India, Sept. 21 -- India's Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar said in Ahmedabad earlier this month that problems related to exclusion of names in the Special Intensive Review (SIR) in states would be resolved by the Lok Sabha polls in 2029.

"Our focus is to clean the electoral rolls of those who are dead, shifted, absent and duplicates from the electoral rolls. As a Constitutional authority, we depend on documents. You have to provide your documents or of your parents, to prove you are Indian," he said, recalling that a similar SIR exercise was also conducted in 2003-2004.

Let's look at the numbers to examine what happened during the 2003-2004 SIR.

Before the SIR started in 2003-04, the total number of voters in India was ...