Aadhaar number. PAN card. Voter ID. Ration card. Sanichari Devi, 63, has packed all of these documents into a polythene bag for the special intensive revision (SIR) hearing at the Government Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya, a government school near Mori Gate in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk Assembly constituency on September 15.

These were the papers by which the State had recognised her, again and again, as a citizen all these years, she claims. But that afternoon they were not enough.

“First, the official at the hearing asked me to bring a bank passbook for which I had to return home,” she says. Home is about two kilometres away in an overcrowded Chandni Chowk locality. “When I came back panting, I was again sent another kilometre to get a photocopy of the documents,” she says on this errand alone.

“Tum log hai na padha likha toh bhi nahi bujha raha hai ki ka ka chahiye, hum toh hain hi angootha chaap, [You are all educated; even then you’re not telling us clearly what documents are needed. I am unlettered],” she says, distressed by the officials’ impatience and their cryptic responses.

For nearly two hours, Devi, who claims her name was on the 2002 electoral roll in Bihar, where she was born, clutches her papers trying to understand the process of staying on India’s electoral roll. She is surrounded by 70 to 80 people, all with similar problems.

Devi is a daily-wage earner. Her ₹400-500 for the day is lost, and she has no idea how to pay for her family of three, including two grandsons. Her son and daughter-in-law are no more. Exhausted from walking and distressed from losing a day’s wage, Devi faints in the afternoon sun. Two men catch her before she falls and help her to a chair.

The government school in Chandni Chowk is one of the three locations in this Assembly constituency where SIR hearings are taking place. These hearings are for voters who had notices served to them for anomalies, like name mismatches, and for being unmapped — meaning their names or relatives’ names were not found on older SIR rolls.

At every hearing location, 100 to 1,000 people turn up every day with documents to prove that they are eligible to vote. Once they are there, many find that none of their documents match the 11 ID proofs prescribed by the Election Commission of India for the SIR. The exercise, rolled out in 2025 just before the Bihar Assembly election, was intended to clean up voter lists by identifying duplicate entries and removing the names of those who have died, moved from their addresses, or are illegal migrants. But since it was rolled out, and now having covered 30 of India’s States and Union Territories, over 13 crore people on the voter list have been removed during the draft stage. This has become the subject of intense public debate, with concerns that genuine voters are being left out, particularly those who struggle to navigate a documentation-heavy process.

The scale of deletions has been striking in Delhi. Of 1.45 crore people who were on the rolls on June 16, 2026, only 97.5 lakh remain. Around 47.6 lakh people have been marked Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD) as reasons for their exclusion at the draft stage. Of the 97.5 lakh on the list, more than one-third on the draft rolls face notices. These will be disposed of by October 29 after they submit their documents either online or at the hearing centres. The final roll will be published on November 4.

Physical and mental stress

At an SIR hearing centre in Rajouri Garden’s government boys’ school, the queue snakes past five rows of Booth Level Officers (BLOs) and Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) seated at desks with laptops. Each family in the line carries a folder of documents collected over decades. Every day, around 500 cases are scheduled for hearing here.

Ram Chandar, 55, from Etah in Uttar Pradesh, has lived in Delhi for 37 years, working at a housekeeping service. He says he has voted during the tenures of Sheila Dikshit and Arvind Kejriwal, and in the last election when Rekha Gupta came to power. But this time, all his family members, including his parents, wife, brother, and sister-in-law, received notices stating that they had failed to provide details of themselves or a relative from the 2002 SIR rolls.

He is among more than 13.79 lakh people who have been served notices in Delhi after being marked “unmapped”; another 19.33 lakh were flagged for “logical discrepancies”, including name mismatches and age-related anomalies. Even after submitting his previous voter ID, his identification could not be established.

“They want illiterate people like us to provide such minute details that date back to 2002, while officials themselves are so careless that they sent me a notice for September 14, even though there was a UPSC and NDA entrance exam at this centre. If they cannot keep an account of a month’s calendar, how are we supposed to keep everything in place for years?” he says. His mother and sister-in-law, he says, would not be able to attend the hearing as they were in the village for a family function. “Will their names be deleted forever?” he wonders.

After a three-hour wait, when he climbs onto the stage where officials sit, the BLO takes barely a minute to answer his queries and sends him back with a list of additional documents to bring.

A few places behind him, Seema (name changed to protect privacy), 31, is helping her husband Rahul (name changed to protect privacy) navigate the same scrutiny. “Waise to tum logon ko unke kapdon se pehchaan lete hain; ab humein nahi pehchaan rahe ki hum tumhare desh ke hain ki nahi? [You can recognise people by their clothes, but now you can’t even recognise whether we belong to your country or not?]” she asks.

In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said at a rally in Jharkhand (amid protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was passed that year) that people could identify “aag lagane wale [arsonists]” by their clothes. In Rahul’s case, the only discrepancy was that his father’s name Mahavir was spelled “Mahaveer” on his voter ID. “They asked me to get this corrected and appeal for another hearing,” he says. If Ram Chandar and Rahul were undone by mismatched records, others were undone by the process itself.

Preeti Bora Mondal, 44, received a physical notice for a hearing on September 12, but missed it because of an official event scheduled a month earlier. “Now I got a notice over the phone for October 7. The notice reads that if I have any query, I can contact my BLO. But when I did, she never picked up,” she says. She adds, “They are serving us these notices as if we are criminals or have done something wrong.”

Most recipients didn’t know they could submit their documents online. The website link is available via a QR code on the notice.

Paramjeet Thukral, 55, who has recently moved to her parents’ home in Tagore Garden from south Delhi, says she did try to do everything online, but was unsuccessful as the system said she didn’t have the right documents. “I had attached everything which was needed,” she says, adding that if even half the time the government was spending on the exercise had gone into the city instead, “the roads would be better and the city cleaner.”

Manoj (name changed to protect privacy) and his family of five, who were also at the centre to respond to a notice, had received assurance that their enrolments would stand. His 80-year-old grandmother didn’t get this assurance, despite having voted in at least 10 State and Central elections. “So many illegal votes are cast in every election; they are not vigilant at that time,” he says. Seema, still nearby, is less measured: “Agli baar aane do inko vote maangne, tab bataayenge [The next time let them come asking for our votes; then we’ll teach them a lesson].” She is furious at the two-day wage loss her husband has suffered to get their names enrolled in the voter list and is worried about the cost of the Internet café and corrections still ahead of them.

The confusion around documents

The AERO, Prabhas Kumar, who is attending to queries alone at Devi’s centre, says 7,000 notices had been generated at the centre comprising 50 booths of Chandni Chowk and BLOs are on the field to serve these notices to the people.

On the day Devi visited his station, he said that none of the people had the required documents. “But we are not turning them away. We are taking whatever they are bringing, from a Class 5 marksheet to a discharge card from the hospital where they were born,” Prabhas said, adding that even after maximum consideration, at least 50 people are turned away every day because they do not have a single valid document.

As per the ECI’s Standard Operating Procedure for the SIR, submitting only Aadhaar as a document is not sufficient.

Even though the 11 documents included educational certificates, this did not solve the problem for Yashoda Devi, 36. She sat restlessly outside the hall after being told that her Class 12 certificate, which she had spent a day looking for, would not be accepted because it did not mention her date of birth.

“I only have this. I don’t have a passport or a house in my name. My Class 10 certificate was destroyed when my parents’ house in Varanasi caught fire,” she says. Prabhas says a bank passbook could be attached as proof of date of birth, but he is unsure if it will be accepted.

In Rajouri Garden, several people say they are being asked to provide PAN cards. “I had my Class 10 CBSE marksheet and passport for age proof, yet the BLO kept insisting on a PAN card. When I resisted, saying it was not in the list of 11 documents shared with us, he took the marksheet,” says an attendee at the centre who did not wish to be named.

Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) Iti Agarwal, however, refuted the claim that PAN was being forced on people. “We are taking the PAN card as an additional document for proof of date of birth in cases where the elector has brought no document from those listed by the EC, or where the document provided is unsatisfactory. It is not mandatory since it is not a listed document,” she says. Even though hearings are scheduled in three time slots from the morning to 5 p.m., people in early slots end up waiting until the evening due to the lack of documents, and some return without a chance of hearing in a given slot. Their hearings are rescheduled.

Ader Khan, 52, has come directly from his daily-wage job in Wazirpur after taking half a day off with his wife, Heena Khan, for their 3-5 p.m. slot. However, when they asked for a token, they were turned away and told to come the next day or wait until 7.30 p.m.

“On one day, there are 300 people scheduled to attend a hearing. Not all show up. Of those who do, the desk can process only 120-130 cases due to a paucity of time,” says Kumar. As people surround the desk with their doubts, Kumar yells at a BLO who isn’t working at the centre but came for her own hearing. “You yourself don’t know what you have to do. It is because of this that so many people have been served notices. If BLOs had done their job properly, then all these people wouldn’t be standing here with their notices today.”

A BLO from North-east Delhi says the training was minimal and women, who have been appointed as teachers and now must do this work, are expected to go door to door. “How do you expect a woman to knock on a door when the smell of liquor reaches you even before the door is opened?” she says.

In West Delhi, a BLO complains that people living in kothis (bungalows) do not open their doors for them. She says she has sacrificed her brother’s wedding because of her work and leaves her newborn at home until 6 p.m. every day. “We serve notices through WhatsApp in that case,” she adds.

Digital rights activist Nikhil Pahwa, who was also served an SIR notice, says his experience at a hearing centre in central Delhi raises concerns over consent, communication, and the burden placed on voters.

“Officials directed applicants to write their mobile phone numbers on forms despite these being optional, raising questions about whether voter IDs were being linked to phone numbers without the voters’ consent. Also, whether consent was taken for photographing the voters,” he says, adding that he plans to file an RTI on the issue.

He adds that officials are rude, almost bullying people from underprivileged sections of society. At Rajouri Garden, an official yells at a woman wearing a salwar suit when she climbs onto the stage to ask when she would be called. She has been waiting for hours. “Get down, or I will lodge an FIR against you,” the official says, leaving the woman humiliated enough to leave the hearing.

ishita.mishra@thehindu.co.in

suruchi.kumari@thehindu.co.in

Edited by Sunalini Mathew and Amarjot Kaur

It is around 11 a.m. and the downpour is intensifying. Mahesh Saini, 40, with a sack slung over his left shoulder and a stick in his right hand, reaches the Nehru Nagar Atal Canteen, an initiative of the Delhi government to provide meals at ₹5 each. As he enters, a man from a counter inside shouts, waving his hand: “Bora bahar (Leave the sack outside).”  

Mahesh, a ragpicker, puts down the white plastic sack, ties its mouth carefully, and leaves it next to the door. He props up his stick there too. His once-white T-shirt and his hair tell the same story: neither has been washed for a while. 

He walks to the counter and the man behind a laptop holds out a web camera and takes his photo. “Now blink,” the operator says, so that the camera can scan his iris. Mahesh silently obeys, as he knows the drill by now. He produces a ₹5 coin, moves to the next counter and picks up a steel plate. 

A woman serving the meals wastes no time in filling the plate’s compartments with scoops of hot short-grain rice, yellow dal with some rajma, a runny sabzi (vegetable) of aloo (potato) with a little brinjal, and four thin tawa rotis. 

Mahesh settles at one of the six metal tables with attached metal stools. “Khana mujhe achha lagta hai (I like the food). There are no complaints,” he says, revealing his pan-stained teeth. There are about 15 people eating at the canteen. Outside, the rain pours down.

Mahesh came to Delhi about a month ago from his village in Madhubani district of Bihar after his wife died. He collects plastic bottles and other trash. For this, he earns ₹200 a day. “I end up spending almost all the money,” Mahesh says, adding that he sleeps on the footpath. 

He fishes out a flimsy black polythene bag from his pocket and packs three rotis in it for later and continues to eat the rice and dal with his hand.  

For thousands of people like Mahesh, Atal Canteens have become a daily stop for a cooked meal, which costs them little. Since December 2025, the Delhi government has started similar Atal Canteens at 100 locations across the city, giving out close to 50,000 meals every day. Each canteen has a daily capacity to provide 1,000 meals, 500 each for lunch and dinner. 

The contract for running the 100 canteens is given to 11 different companies or NGOs via a tender process. The company charges ₹30 for each meal, of which it collects ₹5 from the individual and ₹25 from the government. The 100 canteens are divided into 20 groups of five each. Food is cooked at a central canteen for each group of five canteens, and the vendor is not supposed to supply food to anyone else from there, officials say. The cooked food is then distributed to the canteens in steel drums or insulated casseroles of 20-30 litres. 

At the launch of the scheme on December 25 last year, the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta said that the government’s aim was to make sure that no one in Delhi goes hungry. India ranks 102nd out of 123 countries in the Global Hunger Index report, with a score of 25.8 that places the country in the “serious” hunger category.

Chief Minister Rekha Gupta says the subsidised food network has crossed the milestone of 1 crore meals served. “For the Delhi Government, Atal Canteens are an expression of our commitment to Antyodaya. The progress of Delhi must reach the person standing at the very last mile,” Gupta says. She adds that the government is open to improving the menu, but every change will be driven by nutrition, evidence, affordability, and the preferences of the people.

Respite for thousands 

Though most canteens have come up near slum clusters, a few are located near hospitals, colleges, and bus terminals, drawing people from diverse backgrounds: ragpickers, autorickshaw drivers, delivery agents, students.

The dal and the sabzi change after every meal at each canteen. On rotation are kaali (black) dal, masoor, chana dal; aloo and chana, or aloo and tomato. Unlike Oliver Twist, who was admonished for asking for a second serving, at many Atal canteens, people can refill their plates. 

Mukesh Kumar Aggarwal, advisor, Micro Education and Social Welfare Society, a non-profit organisation that runs 10 Atal Canteens, says, “For a canteen like the one in Anand Vihar, where almost 500 meals are served for lunch, we make around 125 kg of dal plus sabzi, 100 kg of rice, and 2,000 rotis,” Aggarwal says.

“After paying the workers, we make maybe 50 paisa per plate or sometimes just break even, but we are a non-profit and our aim is to feed the hungry and provide employment to people and not make money,” he adds.

Every canteen is almost identical, with six tables and eight stools each, white tiled floors, and a metal roof. Staff at the canteens complain they are not even paid the minimum wage. A woman in her 40s serving food at one of the canteens, says she gets only ₹8,500 per month. “We come here at 10 in the morning and leave only after 9 at night and get only two days off a month. The money we get is very low and there is no time to work anywhere else either,” the woman, who does not want to be identified, fearing action from the contractor, says.

Outside every canteen are photos of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Delhi CM Gupta, and Vajpayee. The canteen is named after him, but his picture is the smallest of the three. There are similar posters inside the canteens too. Mahesh points to one such poster inside the canteen, speaking about the leaders, punctuating his sentences with “Jai Shree Ram, Jai Hanuman,” ending with “Modi Zindabad.” 

This does not go down well with Appu Rao, 48, at the table behind him. “Modi is giving (subsidised) food now, but in the South it has been given for a long time,” Rao, from Andhra Pradesh, says. “Delhi is the national capital. It should have happened here first. Gas cylinders cost ₹4,000 now. He (Modi) is actually taking from us. Everything is expensive.” Mahesh smiles, finishes his food, and leaves. 

Rao, who works as a daily wage labourer, says that he doesn’t come to the canteen regularly, as he doesn’t like the food. “Aloo sub mein daal deta hain (They put potato in everything). But when I cannot find any work, I come here,” he says, adding that the dal is fine. 

Rao gets into a conversation with another person about how the food was better when the canteen opened and it is still better at the Atal Canteen in Andrews Ganj in south Delhi. “The food at the Gurudwara is better than this. Sometimes, on Sundays you get paneer also there,” he says, a view that is shared by some others too.

Santosh Kumar, 28, at a table behind Rao, taps his shoulder and asks for something. Rao begins to rummage through his plastic bag, taking things out, only to produce one green chilli. “This is the last one. I bought a few for ₹5 the other day. I know a lot of people who come here,” Rao says, smiling, revealing three missing teeth on the lower jaw.  

Like some of the others, Kumar, who also works as a ragpicker, complains that the food lacks salt and spice. At another table, a person unwraps a rain-soaked piece of paper, smaller than a ₹10 note, revealing a spoonful of salt inside. He sprinkles this on his food. 

Suddenly, Chandini Yadav, 35, at another table, gets up and starts shouting at a man and ends up slapping him. The staff intervenes to escort him out of the canteen. 

“He was saying nonsense about me,” Yadav says, as she sits back down at the table. She says she is not a regular. “Cooking gas costs ₹300 a kg now, so we are cooking using wood. But the rain has made the wood wet. That is why I came here today,” says Yadav, who collects plastic bottles with her husband. He’s here too. 

As the afternoon wears on, food delivery agents and auto drivers join the community lunch. “The food is not bad. I know the location of about 15-20 of these canteens and according to the rides I get, I eat at one of these canteens twice a day. I’m saving about ₹3,000 per month,” says Harish Babu, 28, an autorickshaw driver. Many others also pitch in to say how this saves them money, because any food costs between ₹60 and ₹70. 

Besides Delhi, other States too have subsidised food at public canteens. Reetika Khera, professor at IIT Delhi, says there are about a dozen major States in India, that do, including Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. She says that the Zunka Bhakar Kendras started in Maharashtra in the mid-1990s are likely the first such public canteen initiative. 

Khera, in her recent book Freebies or Rights talks about the importance of public canteens in ensuring food security, based on a study done by her team, of 174 such canteens across three States in 2023. She says that in terms of scale, Rajasthan was the best example at the time of the study. In terms of quality, the best she has seen is Kerala. But the meals start at ₹30 in the State’s public canteens. There is also the option of ordering a non-vegetarian dish by paying extra. 

Students’ canteen

Though only 17 kilometres away, the situation at the Atal Canteen near the University of Delhi’s north campus stands in stark contrast to the one at Nehru Nagar. It’s around 6 p.m., and there are students at almost all six tables, many with their shoulder bags. It is cleaner and everyone is given spoons. The Atal Canteen was inaugurated by the Chief Minister on August 16, abutting Chhatra Marg (Students’ Road), leading to many well-known colleges, including St. Stephen’s College, Faculty of Law, and Delhi School of Economics (DSE).

A group of three students, who have completed their Masters in Political Science, are busy eating and chatting. “For ₹5, this is good. What will you get for ₹5 these days?” says Sunil, 25. “I have seen people eating food from dumpsters on the streets.”

Sitting at the other end of the table, Rahul Thakur, 25, lifts his head up and joins the conversation. “I have been eating here twice a day for the last one week. Mirch-masala kam hai (masala is less), but I can save about ₹4,000 a month by eating here,” says Thakur, who is doing his PhD in history. 

He lives nearby and pays ₹3,000 per month for a box-like room, which is only about 6 feet wide and 12 feet long. “People want to get into JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) as rent plus food costs only about ₹3,000 per month at the college hostel. But Delhi University doesn’t have that many hostels and for many people like me, who are living off campus, this canteen is very helpful,” he says. 

Past experiments

In 2010, the then Congress government in Delhi launched the Jan Aahar scheme, under which vans started providing lunch and dinner at ₹15 each. After the AAP government came to power in Delhi in 2015, they promised to start ‘aam aadmi canteens’ to provide meals at ₹5 to ₹10. The Jan Aahar scheme died a slow death. The AAP government started a pilot project at the Delhi government-run LNJP Hospital in 2017 to provide meals at ₹10, but the scheme was not scaled up. 

In the run-up to the Delhi Assembly elections in 2025, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which had been out of power for 27 years in Delhi, promised to establish Atal Canteens. 

When Rekha Gupta inaugurated the Atal Canteen in Nehru Nagar on December 25 last year, the dal was thick and the sabzi had potato, cauliflower, and carrot. The meal actually resembled the photos displayed inside and outside every Atal Canteen. Over time, the dal has become a little more watery and the sabzi has become mostly potato at many of the canteens. 

Professor Khera says, “Across India, including Delhi, the governments should work to improve the nutritional value of the meals served at canteens. Also, there should be an option, like in Kerala, where a person can pay a little extra at the canteen to buy nutritional top-ups. These could be eggs, curd, buttermilk, fish, or meat.”

She also says that when a new party comes to power in a State, they try to undermine the public canteens started by the previous government and people end up suffering due to it. “There should be some legal protection for public canteens, so that they can continue to function despite the change in governments,” she says.

Where commuters eat

The Atal Canteens are a hit at many locations, one of them being Anand Vihar on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border, a stone’s throw away from the interstate bus terminal and railway station. There is a constant buzz of people coming in and leaving, many carrying large travel bags. 

Twenty-three-year-old Tejender Saini’s three-year-old son is sitting at the metal table, crying. His seven-month-old son is crawling below the table, exploring the area, as Saini and his wife eat quickly. “We work at a tile factory in Punjab and are here to meet our relatives for Raksha Bandhan,” Saini says. “At the bus stand someone told us that we would get ‘bhar pet khana’ (food to fill one’s stomach) for just ₹5 and we thought we would check it out,” he says adding that he liked the food.

“Bhar pet khana for just ₹5,” is a refrain that is heard across the canteens. For Khushboo Kumari, 17, who is travelling with her parents and three siblings, the canteen is a rest stop as they change buses to reach their village in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh. She says the food is better than the midday meals served at her school, though the roti was “kachha (undercooked)”. 

But for some, the canteen itself is the destination. Rita Devi, 34, a widow, travelled with her eight-year-old daughter for about half an hour to reach the canteen. “I lost my job as a security guard at a mall about two months back as I fell ill. I have been looking for a job for the past two weeks, but I can’t find anything,” Devi says, as she lifts her maroon dupatta to wipe her tears. “I’m thinking of coming here every day till I find a job.”

nikhil.m@thehindu.co.in