India's Undocumented Are Paying For The State's Failure To Register Them

Pushpo Biswas, 46, has applied twice for a voter card without getting one. She lives in a settlement of about 200 families near Ahiritola Ghat in north Kolkata, in a bamboo-and-tarpaulin hutment that has been home since she came here from a village in Nadia district after marriage. She raised three daughters alone after her husband abandoned her.

She has an Aadhaar card, a PAN card and a ration card, but does not have a birth certificate. Each time she applied, officials asked for one, and each time she had the same answer.

"I don't know why I am not getting my voter card," Biswas wondered. "I provide whatever papers I have. They ask for my birth certificate, which I never had. And my parents are long gone. How can I provide their certificates?"

None of her three daughters has been able to get a voter card either.

Two years ago, Biswas watched a video on a neighbour's phone in which a man said anyone without proper documents would be thrown out of the country. She has been worried since.

Her worry is not baseless. In recent years, the government has clarified that neither Aadhaar nor a passport establishes citizenship. The Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision has carried the question of who can prove they belong into states well beyond Assam. And in May, the newly-elected BJP-led West Bengal government announced a "detect, delete and deport" policy, with a special task force under Kolkata Police to identify overstaying foreign nationals and suspected undocumented migrants.

What stands between Biswas and trouble is a birth certificate she was never given, from a system that was not recording births when she was born.

A record the state did not keep

Biswas was born around 1980 — a decade in which government data on birth registration levels cease to exist entirely. For the state, her birth is an event with no official trace.

The record improves after 2000, but only gradually.

Decode examined the Civil Registration System, the government's own record of registered births, and found that an estimated 13.21 crore births between 2000 and 2024 were never registered — 20.3 percent of all births in that period. The government never published a registration level for 2020, 2021 or 2022, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some states did far worse than others. In Bihar, around 96.3 percent of births went unregistered in 2000. Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh each left more than half of their births unregistered that year.

And registration did not guarantee a certificate in hand. The National Family Health Survey has tracked both separately since 2005-06, when 41.1 percent of children under five were registered but only 26.9 percent had a certificate. By NFHS-5, 89.1 percent were registered and 74.9 percent had a certificate. A birth can sit in a government register for years while the person it belongs to holds nothing to show for it.

The most recent survey, NFHS-6, dropped birth registration from its indicators altogether when it was released in 2026.

"You have a system that never fully worked to get this done," said Harsh Mander, a researcher and social activist who has worked on citizenship exclusion for years.

"The state is responsible for this system that never worked. And it's the people who are being punished for that."

- Harsh Mander

The documents people have, and the ones that count

In the blistering heat of June, Kolkata Police officials came to the Hastings flyovers and asked around 300 families for documents and to prove they were not from Bangladesh. People in these settlements are not without papers, which is what makes the situation difficult to explain to them.

"Almost everybody here has an Aadhaar card, but very few have voter cards," said Firdous Khan, an activist with Muktokantha, a social welfare organisation working with homeless people in West Bengal. A voter card is harder to get, she said, because people have to establish more about themselves and navigate a more involved process.

The national figures bear her out. Aadhaar has reached more than 142.47 crore people. Valid passports number 9.26 crore. PAN cards stand at 46.14 crore as of the last verified government figure in June 2019, though press reports since 2024 put the total nearer 80 crore.

None of them is legal proof of citizenship. Aadhaar is a resident identifier, available to anyone who has lived in India for the required period regardless of nationality. PAN is a tax identifier that foreign nationals earning income in India can and do hold. The Ministry of External Affairs has itself described passports as travel documents issued on the presumption of citizenship, not as legal proof of it.

That leaves the birth certificate, which comes closest to proving where and when a person was born, and is the foundation for claiming citizenship. But what it proves depends on when you were born.

Deeptangshu Kar, an advocate who has represented Hastings residents in court, set out what Section 3 of the Citizenship Act requires. People born in India before July 1, 1987 are citizens by birth. For those born between that date and December 2, 2004, at least one parent had to be an Indian citizen. For anyone born on or after December 3, 2004, both parents must be citizens, or one must be a citizen and the other not an illegal migrant.

The requirement tightens with each generation, and so does the paperwork.

Saraswati Bhattacharyya, 25, cleans houses in north Kolkata and lives in the same Ahiritola settlement that has been her home since childhood. She was born around 2001, which meant that when the SIR came to her settlement, officials asked not just about her but about her parents. She handed over the only document she had — her father's Aadhaar card, which carried an address in her family's ancestral village in Bhangar. She was eventually left out of the SIR list and could not vote.

"It was too complicated for me. There was too much to do," she said. "I work the whole day in other people's houses, cleaning utensils, cleaning floors, and taking care of things. I don't have the time to run around and gather documents or fill up forms."

For anyone born after December 3, 2004, currently 21 and under. the burden doubles.

Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), which works on documentation and litigation for people facing citizenship exclusion, told BOOM it has not yet seen many tribunal cases involving people born after that date because they are still young, but establishing linkage through both a mother's and a father's lineage and proving both Indian is an extremely complicated process.

Going by how cases run in Assam, CJP said, it will be almost impossible for those brought before a tribunal to prove they are Indian.

The gaps that compound

The absence of a birth certificate does not fall evenly. In the NFHS-5 round, 85.4 percent of children in India's richest wealth quintile had one, against 62.4 percent in the poorest. Scheduled Tribe children stood at 70 percent, Scheduled Caste children at 72.9 percent, against 81.3 percent among children from general-category households. The gap has narrowed since 2005-06, when it was more than three times as wide. It has not closed.

Mander described a sequence he saw repeatedly during the NRC exercise in Assam. A girl born at home gets no birth certificate. She does not complete school. She marries in her teens. "The first certificate that actually demonstrates that you exist is your Nikah Nama," he said — leaving her with nothing from before her marriage and easy to portray as someone who came from across the border.

CJP reported the same pattern from its tribunal casework. Women's names often do not appear in any voter list alongside their parents, CJP said, because many women cast their first vote only after marriage and under a married name.

When that is combined with not completing schooling and having no admit card from any state examination, there is a full possibility of being declared a foreigner. Those targeted, in CJP's account, are mostly marginalised, illiterate or non-matriculate, and linguistically Bengali Muslim.

Errors that follow you for life

For those who do have documents, the trouble usually starts with what is written on them.

"The biggest problem is the discrepancies," Khan said. Names are spelled differently across cards, dates of birth shift from one document to the next, and many of the people she works with cannot read or write and cannot check what is being entered on their behalf.

Khan recalled Suhana Bibi, around 50, who lives in Hastings and began using "Bewa" — a term for widow — in place of "Bibi" after her husband died. She gave her name that way while her details were being recorded for voter documentation, which created a discrepancy that was later flagged. She was advised to drop "Bewa" and continues to be known as Suhana Bibi.

Mander described the same problem at national scale. An Arabic name written in Bengali and then rendered into English can produce many spellings of one person, with "Mohammed" sometimes present and sometimes not. Dates of birth are routinely invented because the large majority of rural people do not know their birthday. A family settles on 1 January or 15 August of a given year. "And we use that as a basis for exclusion," he said.

If you have documents, the state will distrust them, Mander said. If you don't, the state excludes you. Both ways you lose.

The Bengal SIR

West Bengal began the Special Intensive Revision with 7.66 crore voters on its rolls. By the time it ended in April this year, close to 91 lakh names had been struck off.

The deletions happened in two rounds, and the difference matters.

The first was routine. When the draft roll was published on December 16, 2025, about 58 lakh names were removed as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate — most of that number, around 24 lakh, were people recorded as dead.

The second was new. Alongside the final roll in February, the Commission flagged 60,06,675 voters, about 8.5 percent of the state's electorate, as having what it called logical discrepancies in their records.

The category had not been used in any previous revision. Those voters stayed on the list but had to prove themselves. Seven hundred and five judicial officers, appointed under Supreme Court supervision, went through the cases. By April 7, around 32 lakh were confirmed eligible and 27,16,393 were found ineligible and deleted.

The reach of the exercise was wider still. Notices over logical discrepancies went to around 1.36 crore people in the state — close to one voter in five.

Logical discrepancy is the term Mander kept returning to. He pointed to a rule Bengal introduced under which having six or more children could itself be treated as a discrepancy. "I really found that quite extraordinary," he said.

He compared the 27 lakh marked ineligible to Assam's "D-voter" category, which was introduced as a temporary marking around a single election and never lifted, leaving people unable to access government entitlements or vote decades later. "I think that's going to be the fate of these 27 lakh people."

Detect, delete, deport

In May, the new state government ordered holding centres to be set up across West Bengal and announced a special task force under Kolkata Police to identify overstaying foreign nationals and suspected undocumented migrants. Officers were directed to conduct field inquiries and begin detention and deportation proceedings where required.

When the police asked the families living under the Hastings flyover for documents and to prove they were not from Bangladesh, they showed what they had. The police then photographed some families, including that of Laila Bibi, 21, who lives there with nine members of her family.

"This is a first for me," said Bibi, who was born and grew up under the flyover.

"I have seen many police raids where our belongings and utensils were thrown on the streets and we were asked to vacate the space. But no one has ever suspected us to be Bangladeshi before this."

- Laila Bibi

Bibi has an Aadhaar card, a PAN card and a birth certificate. Her husband has only PAN and Aadhaar, and neither has a voter card. At 21, her birth year was around 2005, when the national unregistered share stood at 37.5 percent.

Kar said a person does not stop being an Indian citizen because documents were never made, lost or contain mistakes. But proving it becomes harder without them. Under Section 16 of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, the onus of showing they are not a foreigner falls on the individual.

"For someone who has spent a lifetime without documents, that can be an enormous burden," Kar said. "But absence of documents cannot itself become proof that someone is Bangladeshi."

Who passes the citizenship test?

CJP described the problem as structural. Proving citizenship on the basis of papers alone is difficult, the fault lies with the entire system, and its main targets are the marginalised and the poor, especially women.

Mander is not certain he would pass the test himself. He comes from a Partition family and said that if called upon he did not think he could produce most of the documents required about his mother, his grandparents and their parents. Asked what alternatives exist for people without a birth certificate or school record, he named land ownership — which, he said, "reflects privilege."

In Assam that logic reaches its limit, he said, because cultivation along the Brahmaputra and on the river islands is transitional by nature and islands wash away and reappear each year. "Nobody has records. Nobody can have records. Then we use the absence of records against a particular community."

Biswas is still waiting on the voter card she has applied for twice. None of her daughters has one.

"I am not educated. I am not even sure what is going on," she said. "I just hope I don't get into trouble for not having these papers."

Read: CRS Data Appendix