SIR notice to Amartya Sen reveals how burdensome India’s overseas vote really is.....by KBS Sidhu
Section 20A gives overseas Indian citizens the vote—but the numbers show how rarely it is exercised; it’s time to make the right usable, not merely legal.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s brush with the Election Commission’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is a striking reminder that even the most eminent citizens can be pulled into the procedural machinery of voter-roll verification.
But the real story his case throws up is not about one notice. It is about a large, largely ignored class of voters—Indian citizens living abroad—whose voting right exists firmly in law, yet remains punishingly hard to exercise in practice.
India’s overseas vote is available only to a specific category of “NRI”: an Indian citizen who holds an Indian passport and has not acquired the citizenship of any other country. (India does not allow dual citizenship; once you take foreign citizenship, you cease to be an Indian citizen and lose political rights, including the vote.)
Parliament created a dedicated legal route for such citizens through Section 20A of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 (operational since 2011), which recognises them as “overseas electors.” The prescribed enrolment procedure is via Form 6A—a separate application category (not the ordinary resident-voter form).
The crucial condition is that registration is tied to the Indian address recorded in the applicant’s passport. That passport address determines the constituency and the specific polling station at which the overseas elector is placed on the rolls.
And here lies the catch: there is no routine facility for embassy voting, online voting, or a general postal ballot for overseas electors. To vote, an overseas elector must physically travel to India, go to the polling station mapped to the passport’s Indian address on polling day, and produce the original passport as identification.
The numbers reveal how severe this burden is. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, there were 1,19,374 registered overseas electors, yet only 2,958 actually voted—and Kerala alone accounted for 2,670 of those votes. The right is real; the pathway to using it is the barrier.
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KBS Sidhu, IAS (Retd.IAS )Former Special Chief Secretary, Punjab
kbssidhu@gmail.com
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