Breaking Women dominate voter deletions in five Old City constituencies in Hyderabad: report

By Divya Seth · 2 Sep 2026

A new field investigation has found that women account for the overwhelming majority of names removed from electoral rolls across five assembly constituencies in Hyderabad’s Old City, raising sharp questions about the integrity of voter registration in one of India’s most closely watched political battlegrounds. The findings, drawn from a door-to-door survey conducted ahead of the upcoming Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections, suggest that deletion rates in parts of the Old City are far higher than the state average and disproportionately affect female voters.

The survey, carried out by a coalition of civil society groups working on women’s political participation, covered the five Old City assembly segments that fall within GHMC limits: Charminar, Yakutpura, Bahadurpura, Malakpet and Karwan. Researchers compared the 2026 electoral roll with household listings and found that of approximately 41,000 names identified as deleted in those constituencies, more than 32,000, or roughly 78 percent, were women. The pattern was most pronounced in Charminar and Bahadurpura, where the share of female deletions exceeded 80 percent.

What happened

The field teams visited a randomly selected sample of households across the five constituencies, cross-checked the names on the current voter list against the family’s recollection of who was registered, and recorded cases where residents said a family member — usually a woman — had been struck off the roll without their knowledge. Volunteers documented the deleted entries, the household’s relationship to the missing voter and the reasons, where offered, for the deletion.

According to the report, the most commonly cited causes were the death of a relative whose name had not been removed from an earlier roll, the relocation of a family — typically after marriage — and the systematic deletion of voters listed against a single address once that property was reclassified or demolished. In a significant number of cases, however, families reported that no notice had been received and no enquiry had been made before the deletion, in apparent violation of the Election Commission of India’s own procedural guidelines.

The report’s authors stress that the deletions are not, in themselves, evidence of organised malpractice. But they argue that the scale, concentration and gendered character of the removals warrant immediate verification by electoral authorities before the GHMC polls.

Why it matters

The Old City has long been a focus of competing claims by political parties about voter manipulation, with rivals accusing each other of deleting supporters and adding fictitious names in dense, predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods. The new data feed directly into that dispute by quantifying a pattern that until now has mostly surfaced as anecdote.

For women’s representation, the implications are particularly stark. National data already show a wide gender gap in voter enrolment, and Telangana’s own rolls reflect a smaller female-to-male ratio than the state’s population would predict. If the survey’s findings are borne out, the Old City deletions would further entrench that gap precisely in constituencies where women’s votes are most closely contested. Civic groups also warn that women who are silently dropped from the rolls lose not just the franchise but access to a range of welfare schemes that are now routinely linked to the voter ID.

“The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence,” one of the lead researchers said, pointing to the near-identical deletion profiles in neighbourhoods with very different housing types. “When you see more than three-quarters of removed names in a constituency being women, in five adjacent seats, you are not looking at demographic churn. You are looking at a process that is missing women systematically.”

Election officials in Telangana have not yet published a ward-level audit of the deletions, but the state chief electoral officer’s office said it had received the report and would examine its methodology. An official response is expected before the notification of the GHMC elections.

Background and context

The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, one of the largest urban local bodies in the country, has not had a fully elected council since 2020, when the previous term expired and subsequent polls were deferred. The state government’s decision to undertake a fresh delimitation exercise, followed by a series of court challenges, left the city under a mix of elected representatives whose terms had lapsed and administrators appointed in their place. The long delay has itself been criticised as a breach of democratic mandate and is one of the reasons civic groups have begun scrutinising the rolls with unusual intensity.

Hyderabad’s Old City, comprising the historic neighbourhoods south of the Musi river, has been the subject of repeated disputes over electoral rolls since the early 2010s. Local civil society organisations have documented what they describe as “silent revisions” — large batches of deletions or additions appearing on the electoral website without corresponding notices to affected voters. The Election Commission has consistently maintained that its processes are transparent and that deletions follow a defined legal procedure that includes house-to-house verification and a draft publication stage.

The new report revisits that claim. It argues that the procedure, as set out in the Election Commission’s Manual of Electoral Rolls, requires a booth-level officer to physically verify each household before a deletion is finalised, and that any contested entry must be flagged in the draft roll. According to the survey, fewer than one in ten families whose relatives had been deleted reported any visit by a booth-level officer in the year before the deletion.

Demographers caution that female-headed households, especially in lower-income areas, are more vulnerable to being missed in routine door-to-door checks. Women who live in joint families but vote separately, women who have moved after marriage without re-registering, and women whose identity documents are held by male relatives are all at higher risk of falling off the rolls during any cleanup. The report argues that these structural factors are likely contributing to the pattern but cannot fully explain it.

Analysis: The report’s central claim is statistical — that the share of women among deleted voters in five Old City constituencies is far higher than the share of women in the local population or in the original rolls. If the underlying data hold, the gap between 78 percent of deletions being female and roughly 49 percent of the population being female is too wide to be explained by demographic factors alone. The authors stop short of alleging deliberate targeting, but their data effectively shift the burden of proof onto electoral authorities to demonstrate that the removals followed procedure and were individually justifiable.

What to watch next

The state chief electoral officer is expected to publish a ward-level audit of the deletions in the five constituencies, a step the report’s authors have formally requested. Civil society groups are also preparing a public database of the deleted names, with the consent of the affected families, so that residents can check whether they remain on the roll ahead of the GHMC notification.

Attention will now turn to the Hyderabad District Election Officer, who oversees the city-wide roll, and to the political parties contesting the Old City seats. The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, which holds most of the assembly seats in the area, has previously accused the state machinery of carrying out targeted deletions; the Bharat Rashtra Samithi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have traded similar allegations. Whether the parties use the new report to demand a fresh verification drive, or to challenge specific deletions in court, will be a near-term indicator of how the dispute plays out.

A further test will come when the draft roll for the GHMC wards is published. Election rules require the draft to be displayed at every polling station and to invite claims and objections before it is finalised. Civic groups say they will deploy volunteers at that stage to verify whether the women identified in the survey have been reinstated.

Conclusion

The new survey does not, on its own, prove that voters in the Old City have been deliberately struck off the rolls. What it does establish is a measurable, geographically concentrated and strongly gendered pattern of deletions that is at odds with the official characterisation of routine roll maintenance. With the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections approaching after a years-long delay, the report is likely to intensify the long-running argument over who gets to vote in Hyderabad’s most contested neighbourhoods — and to put pressure on the state’s election machinery to show, in detail, that its procedures have been followed.

Sources

Women dominate voter deletions in five Old City constituencies in Hyderabad: report, https://heraldexpress.com/women-dominate-voter-deletions-in-five-old-city-constituencies-in-hyderabad-report

Source: The Hindu – National

Story synopsis gathered from: The Hindu – National — source