New Delhi, June 5 -- How do election officials conduct door-to-door verification in abandoned ghost settlements where entire communities have fled in the wake of ethnic violence? And how do they upload photographs of voters' homes when many of those houses have been burnt, bombed or reduced to rubble?

These are among the key questions that the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Manipur has raised with the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the context of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls underway in the violence-hit state.

Senior government officials, who asked not to be named, said that the Manipur CEO's office on Friday wrote to ECI asking for a SOP (standard Operating Procedure) on conducting SIR ...