I completed the SIR voter enumeration in Bangalore. It was frustrating.
The SIR-2026 (special intensive revision) to clean up electoral rolls was conducted in Karnataka in July 2026. You could either fill up and submit the paper forms distributed by the BLO (booth level officer) or submit the form online.
Either way, you would grapple with the ECI's (Election Commission of India) software to locate your current and previous SIR electoral data.
There were two ways to access the data, through the ECI website or their app. I used the website. The website was cleanly laid out and easy to follow. No complaints there. The problems started when you tried to locate your previous SIR data in the 2002 electoral roll.
In 2002, my wife and I were enrolled as voters in Chennai but I was unable to locate us in Chennai’s electoral roll. I have a fairly common name, Vijay, and it has a standard spelling but no combination or variation of my name in part or full came up in the rolls.
Whether I searched in Chennai city or expanded the search to include all of Tamil Nadu, my wife's and my name simply didn’t show up. Even stranger, every search was capped at 100 records. So whether I searched in Chennai or in all of Tamil Nadu, according to the ECI's software, there were only 100 Vijays on the rolls. That's unbelievable.
Since I was not able to locate our names in Chennai, one of India's most educated and tech savvy metros, I did the next best thing and searched for our late parents' names in the Kerala rolls of 2002 when they were still alive and enrolled as voters.
That’s when I stepped into the Alice-in-Wonderland world of translation glitches since all the electoral rolls are in the native language of the state, in this case, Malayalam.
Since my late father-in-law's name was Rajagopalan and there is really only one way to spell it in English, I located that without too much trouble. Though the software did have a quiet chuckle and translated his father's name of K K Menon as Ke Ke Menon which somehow sounded cool and contemporary. No matter, we were halfway there.
But the software really went to town on my late father's name. In Malayalam, my father's name is written as അച്ചുത മേനോന്, not an uncommon name in his time.
All his life, my father wrote his name in English as Achutha Menon, a spelling that served him through education in Kerala, Chennai, and Banaras, and a life across India as an Air Force officer. But we always knew that others with the same name either spelled it differently, or had it spelled differently for them depending on geography.
The purists spelled it Achchutha to emphasize the double 'ch' (as in, say, Bachchan). Some folks ended up as Achyutha. And since north India spells Anitha as Anita and Chithra as Chitra, a few അച്ചുതs ended up as Achuta or even Achchuta.
But EC's software had evolved beyond these common variations. When repeated searches on variations of my father’s name did not yield results, I downloaded the entire electoral roll of the polling booth where my parents had voted and went through all 59 pages of it to locate my father's polling details by way of state, district, assembly constituency, polling booth, and part number.
Armed with all of this, I then confronted ECI's software and it finally threw up my father's name in the roll. In Malayalam, of course.
Curious to see how I missed finding it in all my previous searches by name, I used the website’s translation option to find that of all the known variations on the spelling, the ECI's software, in its peculiar wisdom, had translated അച്ചുത as Achut! Generously, it also allowed the variation Achchut.
As Malayalis, we have long tolerated the peculiar predilection of north Indians to truncate words to suit their grammar. So Kerala is Keral in Hindi and Rama is Ram. By that logic, I would not have been surprised to see Achutha truncated to Achuth or even Achchuth.
But what I did not foresee was that this would combine with the other hack of replacing 'th' with just 't' (Anitha here is Anita there, remember). And so we ended up with this weird spelling of Achut for Achutha in the electoral roll.
Carping apart, ECI's software is just not road-ready. It cannot cater to translation errors, imposes arbitrary rules of its own for how Indian names should be spelled in English, and is a recipe for confusion.
If I am not able to trace my name in Chennai's roll and my father's name is mangled in the Kerala rolls, you have to wonder at the potential for disarray in the rest of the country, especially in areas that are not as educated and tech savvy.
This is disquieting.
Either way, you would grapple with the ECI's (Election Commission of India) software to locate your current and previous SIR electoral data.
There were two ways to access the data, through the ECI website or their app. I used the website. The website was cleanly laid out and easy to follow. No complaints there. The problems started when you tried to locate your previous SIR data in the 2002 electoral roll.
In 2002, my wife and I were enrolled as voters in Chennai but I was unable to locate us in Chennai’s electoral roll. I have a fairly common name, Vijay, and it has a standard spelling but no combination or variation of my name in part or full came up in the rolls.
Whether I searched in Chennai city or expanded the search to include all of Tamil Nadu, my wife's and my name simply didn’t show up. Even stranger, every search was capped at 100 records. So whether I searched in Chennai or in all of Tamil Nadu, according to the ECI's software, there were only 100 Vijays on the rolls. That's unbelievable.
Since I was not able to locate our names in Chennai, one of India's most educated and tech savvy metros, I did the next best thing and searched for our late parents' names in the Kerala rolls of 2002 when they were still alive and enrolled as voters.
That’s when I stepped into the Alice-in-Wonderland world of translation glitches since all the electoral rolls are in the native language of the state, in this case, Malayalam.
Since my late father-in-law's name was Rajagopalan and there is really only one way to spell it in English, I located that without too much trouble. Though the software did have a quiet chuckle and translated his father's name of K K Menon as Ke Ke Menon which somehow sounded cool and contemporary. No matter, we were halfway there.
But the software really went to town on my late father's name. In Malayalam, my father's name is written as അച്ചുത മേനോന്, not an uncommon name in his time.
All his life, my father wrote his name in English as Achutha Menon, a spelling that served him through education in Kerala, Chennai, and Banaras, and a life across India as an Air Force officer. But we always knew that others with the same name either spelled it differently, or had it spelled differently for them depending on geography.
The purists spelled it Achchutha to emphasize the double 'ch' (as in, say, Bachchan). Some folks ended up as Achyutha. And since north India spells Anitha as Anita and Chithra as Chitra, a few അച്ചുതs ended up as Achuta or even Achchuta.
But EC's software had evolved beyond these common variations. When repeated searches on variations of my father’s name did not yield results, I downloaded the entire electoral roll of the polling booth where my parents had voted and went through all 59 pages of it to locate my father's polling details by way of state, district, assembly constituency, polling booth, and part number.
Armed with all of this, I then confronted ECI's software and it finally threw up my father's name in the roll. In Malayalam, of course.
Curious to see how I missed finding it in all my previous searches by name, I used the website’s translation option to find that of all the known variations on the spelling, the ECI's software, in its peculiar wisdom, had translated അച്ചുത as Achut! Generously, it also allowed the variation Achchut.
As Malayalis, we have long tolerated the peculiar predilection of north Indians to truncate words to suit their grammar. So Kerala is Keral in Hindi and Rama is Ram. By that logic, I would not have been surprised to see Achutha truncated to Achuth or even Achchuth.
But what I did not foresee was that this would combine with the other hack of replacing 'th' with just 't' (Anitha here is Anita there, remember). And so we ended up with this weird spelling of Achut for Achutha in the electoral roll.
Carping apart, ECI's software is just not road-ready. It cannot cater to translation errors, imposes arbitrary rules of its own for how Indian names should be spelled in English, and is a recipe for confusion.
If I am not able to trace my name in Chennai's roll and my father's name is mangled in the Kerala rolls, you have to wonder at the potential for disarray in the rest of the country, especially in areas that are not as educated and tech savvy.
This is disquieting.
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