Few Nepalis, but no illegal immigrants in Hyderabad SIR: DEO

Hyderabad: While Union Home Minister Amit Shah claimed that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls have removed three crore illegal immigrants, it is clear now that Hyderabad did not contribute to the deletions.

In fact, the exercise in Telangana did not find even one illegal immigrant in the voters’ lists of Hyderabad’s 15 constituencies, reported The Hindu on Wednesday, November 4.

According to District Election Officer and Commissioner of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) R V Karnan, only a few Nepali citizens were found on the rolls, and those have been deleted.

“Though foreign nationals, we cannot call them illegal immigrants, as they have entered the country through a legal route. But since they do not have citizenship here and hold their franchise back in Nepal, their inclusion in electoral rolls here is illegal, and we have removed their names, Karnan said.

He said that 10 to 12 people were detected on the rolls of the Sanath Nagar Constituency, even as he denied the presence of Bangladeshi nationals or Rohingya Muslims on Hyderabad’s electoral rolls.

This challenges the narrative that illegal migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh have been enrolling themselves as voters in electoral rolls, compromising the integrity of the electoral process.

SIR 2026 includes an additional exercise to map voters against the 2002 electoral rolls, with the stated aim of identifying infiltrators and other ineligible persons for removal from the voters’ list.

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