India's ongoing electoral roll revision, known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), has resulted in the exclusion of 4.76 million names from Delhi's draft electoral roll, representing 33% of the city's previous electorate. The impact is particularly severe in the GB Road red-light district, where data shows that at least 500 of the 650 registered sex workers have been marked as "shifted" or failed to establish eligibility due to missing documentation.
GB Road's sex workers face disproportionate exclusion
GB Road, officially known as Garstin Bastion Road, is a commercial thoroughfare in Old Delhi that transforms into a red-light district at dusk. An estimated 2,800 sex workers live and work in brothels occupying the upper floors of dilapidated buildings. According to officials overseeing about 1,300 voters in the area, approximately 650 were sex workers on the previous electoral roll. Of these, more than three-quarters have been excluded from the draft roll published on 31 August.
One affected individual is 36-year-old Beauty*, who has lived on GB Road for over two decades. She obtained her first voter ID in 2008, when her address and verification by a booth-level officer (BLO) were sufficient for inclusion. Under the new SIR rules, voters must prove their link to the previous electoral roll or produce documents such as a passport, birth certificate, or education certificate. Beauty, trafficked at 16 and brought to GB Road, lacks contact with her family and cannot obtain her matriculation certificate from her native village in Rajasthan.
Documentation requirements create insurmountable barriers
Beauty's Aadhaar card, India's biometric identity document, lists her GB Road address, but this does not establish citizenship or voting eligibility under SIR. She attempted to obtain her matriculation certificate with help from a long-time customer, but the effort failed. "If I had the papers to show my father's birth certificate, or even my own matriculation certificate, then I could prove who I am," she said. "But how can I go back to my village to ask for these things when my trafficking has brought so much shame to my family that they no longer accept me?"
Of the nine sex workers interviewed for this story, none had successfully completed the SIR process. Six said they never received the enumeration form distributed by BLOs, while the remaining three could not meet documentation requirements. Kiran Deshmukh, a sex worker and coordinator at the National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW), noted that many workers were trafficked as children, never attended school, or have moved frequently without leaving a stable documentary trail.
BLO discretion and systemic gaps
Sagrika Rajora, a researcher and member of Voter Adhikar Manch, a citizens' collective, criticized the process for placing excessive burden on individuals. "There is so much discretion vested in one BLO. Even if you leave citizenship aside and talk only about voter rights, the entire process of delivering and collecting these forms depends on that one person," she said. Rajora added that categories like "shifted" become an easy way for BLOs to exclude people whose lives are complex and mobile.
The gaps also affect workers' children. Dinesh*, 23, whose mother was a sex worker and died three years ago, was unable to obtain her death certificate because she never had a birth certificate. His matriculation certificate lacks his father's name, which he believes may be why his name is missing from the draft roll. "If my mother gave birth to me, why do I need a man's name on any official certificate?" he asked.
Welfare implications and next steps
The NNSW has written to the chief electoral officer seeking special measures for sex workers, but joint chief electoral officer Balram Meena told The Hindu there is no separate process. "If their mapping can't be done and there are no documents either, their names will be removed as per the process," he said. In West Bengal, where SIR has been completed, the BJP government has used deletion lists to scrutinize welfare eligibility, excluding about 3 million beneficiaries from the Annapurna Bhandar scheme.
The next stage of SIR in Delhi—issuing notices and handling claims and objections—will continue until 29 October. Those excluded can challenge their omission, but Dinesh says he does not intend to. "Even if my mother were alive today, I don't think that would be enough to prove anything. She never had the documents they are asking for. So how am I supposed to get those documents now, especially after her death?"
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
