Hyderabad: Several prominent public figures based in Hyderabad including movie actors, sports stars and businessmen, have been issued notices by the state Election Commission as part of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
Former India batters VVS Laxman and Mithali Raj; actors Venkatesh, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Mahesh Babu and his wife Namrata Shirodkar; Baahubali director SS Rajamouli; and badminton players Pullella Gopichand, Saina Nehwal and her former husband Parupalli Kashyap featured in the list published on the official website of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Telangana, on Thursday.
The EC flagged VVS Laxman and Samantha for spelling mismatches in their names and their parents’ names, while Rajamouli and Mithali Raj were issued notices because their names were unmapped in the last round of SIR exercise.
Other prominent names include Apollo’s Upasana Konidela and Murali Krishna Divi, founder of pharmaceutical firm Divi’s Laboratories.
The state election commission published the list of VIPs who were served notices under the polling booths to which they are mapped. It said the notices were part of standard administrative checks for minor anomalies, including mismatches in names or addresses, or failure to map voter data with historical SIR lists. As the electoral roll verification and updating process is being carried out area-wise and constituency-wise, several prominent names have surfaced because they all reside in the upscale Jubilee Hills area.
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Hyderabad district election officer (DEO) RV Karnan said those who were served the notices or their representatives must submit clarifications and verification documents by 7 October.
He told ThePrint that the notices were meant only to ensure voters corrected minor anomalies and that they already had the required documents. “This should not be viewed as a criminal notice and is part of the larger process,” he said. “To accommodate the busy schedules of the VIPs, we have also made a provision for their family members or representatives to submit the relevant details to the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) instead of attending the verification hearings in person.”
Since the SIR exercise began on 25 June, the ECI has issued the forms to over 12.5 lakh citizens in Hyderabad alone. The electoral roll revision is being carried out for more than 3.3 crore electors in the state. Election authorities said this was the first such exercise undertaken after Andhra Pradesh’s division in 2014.
According to data on the website, more than 2.64 crore of the 3.3 crore voters have submitted their enumeration forms. A total of 73,39,235 electors were categorised under the Absent, Shifted, Death and Duplicate (ASDD) category.
The draft rolls were published on 17 August with the state EC allowing citizens to file claims or contest voter deletions till 7 October. The final rolls will be published on 9 November.
In Bengaluru, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and his family, and Zerodha founders Nithin and Nikhil Kamath were among those served SIR notices. Nilekani’s family was reportedly flagged as “unmapped with the last SIR (2002 rolls)”, while the Kamath brothers and their mother, Revathi, received notices over a “parents’ name mismatch” in the Bengaluru South Assembly constituency.
(Edited by Chingkheinganbi Mayengbam)
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