In Bihar: ‘dead’ Adivasis tell their tales

“Isko dekhiye! Mar gaya hai…aur chal raha hai [Look at him! Dead but walking].”

Amit Marandi has been getting a few laughs lately, and today is no different. He is walking towards the machan (bamboo bench-like structure) where half a dozen of his fellow villagers are now enjoying a giggle at his expense.

The 32-year old Santhal Adivasi joins in the laughter, but soon his expression changes. Angst shrouds his face as he says, “Dekh lijiye, hum zinda hain lekin humko mar diya hai [Look at me, alive yet declared dead].”

The daily wage worker from Lohsinghna village in Bihar, is referring to his name on a recent list of deceased voters. This damming list was made during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voters names. The exercise was undertaken in the state by the Election Commission to weed out ineligible voters from electoral rolls. But here in Loa tola many eligible Adivasi voters have been struck ‘dead’. On the phone, I had alerted local sources that Amit's name was on the list.

Knowing his name is on the deleted voters list does make him feel bad: “Bura to lagta hai na [I definitely feel bad].”

It is around 12 noon and I am in Loa tola – an Adivasi hamlet – with a list of deleted voters of booth number 223. I found the village while doing a random check on the Election Commission website for lists of deleted voters. That’s how I came across booth 223 of Lohisingha village where many Adivasi names had been deleted.

Loa tola is a Santhal Adivasi hamlet that gets its name from a tree. Dumar or gular (cluster fig) tree is called ‘loa’ in Santhali – an Austroasiatic language spoken by roughly 74 lakh people in India.

Locals say that their hamlet or tola once had a giant fig tree which became the identity of this Santhali hamlet of largely mud and thatch houses. The average monthly income of most Santhali people is around Rs. 6,000 or less, says the Bihar Caste Survey of 2022-2023. Around one in five Santhal Adivasis work in agriculture as small or tenant farmers. The rest, like Amit, do wage labour – he works as a driver in Patna.

It's on a warm day in September, and grey monsoon clouds are floating in the sky. The hamlet of Loa tola is almost deserted. The only action is the spot where half a dozen men aged between 19 to 50 years are sitting on a bench, casually chatting. A couple of them are watching funny reels on mobile phones.

Armed with the list, I introduce myself and show them the printed sheet of paper in my hand. I inform them that these names have been deleted from the voter list as the Election Commission has marked them as ‘dead’.

I immediately have their attention. They rush to bring their own voter cards to check if their names are on the list. Many of them breathe a sigh of relief seeing their names are not included.

But not everyone here is lucky to be ‘alive’ or undeleted.

Bihar goes to the polls in November 2025. At stake are 243 Assembly seats with 7.89 crore voters. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which rules at the centre, is keen to make its mark here. The SIR being conducted by the Election Commission to revise voter lists, is seen as working on the behest of the BJP, says the Opposition.

On August 1, 2025, the draft electoral rolls were published, and after the Supreme Court intervened, the list was made public. In the revision, 65 lakh voter names across Bihar were deleted. Out of these, 36 lakhs names were deleted as they had either permanently migrated or could not be traced; 22 lakh people were found to be dead, and the remaining seven lakh were registered multiple times.

Lohsinghna village which falls under the Chakai assembly seat, also took a hit – deleted names were 169, roughly 50 per cent of them Adivasis. Locals here confirm that half the Adivasis on the list have been wrongly declared ‘dead’.

Amit Marandi is one such person. His Electors’ Photo Identity Card (EPIC) number and name appeared on the list of deleted voters. A Santhal Adivasi, Amit drives a truck loading stone chips. He dropped out of school in Class five. Around one in four Santhalis complete primary school, and less than one per cent ever make it to university.

When asked how he thinks his name got wrongly added he says that he probably failed to submit the enumeration form. Amit points out that he has voted every single time: “I cast my vote every single time. Even if I miss the Panchayat elections, I come to cast my vote in the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.”

For voting in the 2024 General Elections he recalls losing two days of wages. “I came all the way from Patna by train and then took a bus to reach my village. I stayed for two days to vote. I had to incur a loss of 1,000 rupees as I had to leave work,” he tells PARI.

The knowledge that his name has been deleted from the voters’ list is also making him tense. “I will face difficulties due to this. Maybe I will no longer get benefits from government schemes?” he asks worriedly.

Bihar is home to 21.99 lakhs Adivasis, notes a 2022-2023 caste survey conducted by the state government. The state once had a sizeable Adivasi population but a large chunk of them went to Jharkhand – a new state carved out of Bihar in 2000. In Jharkhand, they are 26 per cent of the total population and electorally dominant.

But in Bihar, they are less than two per cent of the total population, and largely ignored in news and state politics. Scattered across many constituencies, their impact in any election is negligible. And so their deletion has not received attention from the media or political parties.

Adivasi voters this reporter met were completely unaware of the SIR, why it was being done, or that their name had been deleted.

“Abhi aap bataye toh pata chala hai [Just now I came to know after you informed me],” says Champa Marandi. The 35-year-old Adivasi from Lohsinghna village, says she is completely unaware about the deletion of her name. I took out the sheet for booth number 223 to show her. I confirmed the deletion against her EPIC number.

Interestingly, her husband Sanjay Murmu’s name is there in the draft list. This brings on a light moment as her 40-year-old husband, standing by her side, smiles and mutters: “Yeh kaise ho gaya? Ye to jinda hi hai [How did this happen, she is alive].”

The men and women responsible for the revision are the Booth Level Officers (BLOs). A total of 78,000 officials’ job was to distribute and collect enumeration forms with relevant identity proofs, then prepare draft lists based on this information.They had just one month to complete their targets – 40 voter checks in one day. It was an uphill task, fraught with tension for them, and possible deletion for others.

Miss the BLO and you're ‘dead’. Quite literally.

“There are many booths in Chakai where names of Adivasi voters were deleted,” says Basudev Hansda, District Coordinator of the Adivasi Sangharsh Morcha.

Many BLOs were reprimanded for talking to the media. So on the condition of anonymity, an Adivasi BLO in Jamui told PARI that he had to travel at least 10 kilometres to reach Adivasis living in forests. “I would touch 20-25 houses daily. If the houses were close by, I could cover 50,” he says.

But that was not all. After 12 hours in the field, “we had to upload forms and identity proof to the ECI portal. During the day the internet connection would remain poor, so I had to upload at night, sometimes till 12 or 1 a.m.”

Not finding people at home, or having to return to the same place multiple times, ate into their time. “We were threatened [by seniors] with action if the target was not achieved. We told many voters to just come to the school and get the form filled,” he says. A timeline of at least two months and clearer guidelines would have helped, they say.

Hansda agrees: “I think Adivasi BLOs were given so little time. It may be that they did not reach many Adivasi families, and so they were marked ‘dead’,” he adds. ECI guidelines say that BLOs will have to visit a voter's house at least three times. But the Adivasis I talked to said that BLO never came.

Since 2005, the BJP and Janata Dal (United) have together ruled the state. In these 20 years, the JD(U) deserted the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) twice, and made a short term alliance with Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) – biggest regional party of Bihar.

It is crucial for the BJP, now ruling at the Centre in it's third term, to make a bid to rule the state alone. It has been in ruling coalitions, and has the JD(U) as alliance partner, but it does not want to play second fiddle anymore. The ruling JD(U) is becoming weak in the wake of declining health of party head and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

With Assembly elections round the corner, the Election Commission of India (ECI) started revising electoral rolls through the SIR. “The objective of SIR is to ensure that the names of all eligible citizens of India are in the voter list…” and to weed out ineligible voters, says a press release of the ECI. It goes on to cite rapid urbanisation, the non reporting of deaths and frequent migration, as reasons for the revision.

Enumeration forms were distributed to voters and filled forms were collected and uploaded on ECI portal. This process started on June 25 and went on for a month. The draft electoral rolls were published on August 1, 2025.

As lists went public, claims started coming in from different areas of Bihar that many living people were declared dead, people present at home were declared absent, and even those living in their ancestral homes were declared ‘permanently shifted’ and their names deleted. About 36,475 individual claims were sent to ECI for inclusion of names in voters’ lists; political parties sent 25 claims.

“People who are alive have been declared dead, and dead persons have been declared alive,” spits out an angry Sangita Soren.

She is at her home, barely two kilometres from Loa tola. The house has recently been constructed. The bricks have been pasted with clay – a risky option since the clay can easily get washed away in rain. But Sangita has no money to use sand and cement. “I had kept 25,000 rupees for sand and cement but a thief stole the money.” So she has no choice but to paste the bricks with soil.

With just two cottah of land (less than a tenth of an acre) in the family, her husband Manoj Murmu has to migrate out for work. He works in Kerala in a factory making concrete slabs, earning Rs. 500 a day there.

In Loa tola, 30 to 35 Adivasi families routinely have male members migrating out to Bengaluru, Kerala, Chennai and even remote Jammu and Kashmir where they are employed mostly as daily wage workers. Among the poorest states in the country, out migration from Bihar is higher than the national average.

The 24-year-old Sangita and her 28-year-old husband Manoj, are parents to a six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son.

But in official records, they do not exist.

I inform her about the recent voter list revision exercise and deletion of voters' names which includes her and her husband’s names. She brings out their voter cards. Both cards’ EPIC numbers match with the deleted list. The ECI remark states the reason for deletion of their names as ‘dead’.

”I don't know how they are working,” says Sangita, visibly angry. She came to this hamlet as a bride in 2017, and was added to voter lists around 2020. She voted in the 2024 General Elections: “I had walked for one kilometer and waited for two hours in the queue and voted.”

Sangita is not just worried about the hassle of getting their names removed from this list and rightfully returned to the eligible voters list. There is the added fear of being disenfranchised from state schemes for the poor. “Humlogon ko kagaz par maar diya to ab sarkar se humko to kuch nahi milega [They have killed us on paper, then we will not get anything from the government].”

Her neighbour, Champa Marandi who has been declared ‘dead’, shares that fear: “When we apply for government schemes, they will exclude us as we have been declared dead.” That will mean the loss of subsidised ration and the Rs. 6,000 of PM KISAN money in the coming days.

“We work as daily wage labourers at agricultural fields as well as at construction sites for survival. Subsidised ration and KISAN money help us a lot,” Champa tells PARI.

Her husband Sanjay who works in Kerala, has been home since July. His name remains in the voting list, but it has been removed (along with one son’s name) from the Public Distribution Scheme (PDS). “Currently only I get ration [from the PDS]. I don't know why my husband and son’s names were deleted. We asked the dealer about it and he told us that we will need to apply again,” she says.

When the BLO visited Champa Marandi, she was erroneously told, “your name is there so you don't need to do anything. Persons whose names are not included in the list are being added.”

But her name is now missing.

Amit Marandi whose name was deleted says, “no one visited with enumeration forms during SIR.” He works in Patna, half a day’s journey away. But for the last three months he has been staying at Loa tola.

Amit was raised by a single mother. The youngest among three brothers, he drives a truck loading stone chips and earns Rs.500 a day. He lives with his wife Sunita Hembram, 29 and their four children – aged between two and seven years – in Patna, in a rented room.

“I come regularly to my village as I have six cottah of land [roughly 0.083 acres], where I do cultivation. My mother, Munni Hembram lives in the village,” Amit tells PARI.

No BLO paid Manoj Murmu a visit either, although he has also been in the village for a month. His wife, Sangita says she steps out to get firewood, but he is always home. “In the last one and a half months, no one came to inform us about voter list updation,” she says firmly.

And she has a pertinent question: “Hum bhot dete hain to sarkar ke admi hi hue na! Phir kyu kata gaya hamara naam [We voted. That means we are the government's people! So why was my name deleted]?”

Manoj finally left for Kerala at the end of August, unaware about deletion of his name from voters lists. “I had called him four days ago and informed about it. He told me that he will not return to get it corrected,” she says. They would like to get it corrected, but Sangita has no idea how to go about it.

“Sir, aap theek kar dijiye [Sir, you make the correction],” she requests this reporter.

Postscript: The ECI published the final list of voters on September 30, 2025. The new voter list has 7.42 crore voters – about 47 lakh less than the previous list of 7.89 crore voters. In the Special Intensive Revision, the ECI says that 68.66 lakh electors were removed and 21.53 lakh eligible electors were added.

On October 1, 2025 a day after the final voter list was published, this reporter checked online with EPIC numbers of all the four Adivasis who are in this story, and found that all remain deleted in the final list as well. They will not be able to vote in the upcoming Bihar Assembly polls.

This story is published under the Takshila-PARI Senior Fellowship 2025.