Noida/Ghaziabad: The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls has deepened Ghaziabad’s gender imbalance rather than corrected it, with Sahibabad recording the worst slide of its five assembly seats. Gautam Budh Nagar, by contrast, managed to close its gap from 817 before SIR to 828 after SIR.Ghaziabad’s female per 1,000 male voter ratio fell to 789 from 811 before the exercise. This is in line with UP’s overall trajectory. While the state’s gender ratio rose from 824 at the draft stage to 834 after the SIR, it remains well below the pre-revision baseline of 877.
The sharpest drop in the two NCR districts was recorded in Sahibabad assembly segment, where the gender ratio plunged from 779 before the revision to 685 after it. The number of women voters in the constituency came down from 4,53,449 to 2,95,045—a drop of 35%—compared to a 26% decline among male voters.Of the four other constituencies, Muradnagar recorded the highest gender ratio in the district at 863, up from 852, after the number of male voters dropped 14%, as compared to female voters at 13%. Loni improved marginally from 808 to 820 for the same reason. The Ghaziabad city seat also edged up from 817 to 841, with the number of male voters declining at 17% against 14% for women. In Modinagar, the ratio slipped slightly from 859 to 851 as both male and female voters saw a similar decline.Election officials attribute the severity of Sahibabad’s decline to the constituency’s mobile and layered population. The seat spans upscale trans-Hindon enclaves, including Indirapuram, Vaishali, Vasundhara, alongside older middle-income colonies such as Shalimar Garden and Rajendra Nagar, and dense migrant-worker clusters in the Sahibabad Industrial Area, Arthala and Mohan Nagar. Urban villages, including Khoda, Bhopura, Makanpur and Pasonda, add further complexity to voter tracking.Field officers conducting door-to-door verification claimed women were disproportionately affected by deletion drives, with duplicate registrations, particularly as entries were maintained at both parental and marital addresses, forming a recurring pattern.“A pattern we kept seeing was women enrolled in two places — at their parental home and again at the husband’s address after marriage,” said a booth-level officer deployed in Sahibabad. “When we verified, one entry had to go. In many cases, the original registration remained on paper even though the voter had shifted years ago, concentrating deletions among women.”District election office data shows that in Sahibabad, over 16% each of total deletions were marked as ‘shifted’ and ‘absent’, while 2% were recorded as deceased, with duplicate enrollments and other reasons accounting for the rest. Officials said the ‘shifted’ category was more pronounced here than the four other constituencies.Gender rights expert Himani Agarwal, a member of the UP State Women’s Commission for Ghaziabad, said the pattern points to a structural failure in how women navigate electoral re-registration after relocation. “Women often get removed from old rolls, but re-registration at the new address is delayed or missed altogether,” she said.In a high-mobility, industrial belt like Sahibabad, informal tenancies and limited awareness about transfer procedures compound the problem. “Add domestic responsibilities and childcare, especially in urban villages, and voter registration becomes a low priority. The result is visible in the falling gender ratio,” Agarwal said.Gautam Budh Nagar presented a different outcome at the district level. Female voters declined by 19% against a 20% fall among male voters, a narrow but consequential difference that allowed the district’s overall gender ratio to improve from 817 to 828.In Noida constituency, female voters dropped by 23%, from 3,40,337 to 2,62,708, but because male voters fell at an even steeper 25%, the gender ratio still improved, from 790 to 810. Dadri showed a similar pattern, with the gender ratio climbing from 832 to 844, the highest in the district.Jewar was the lone exception in GB Nagar, where a decline in female voters was higher at 16% against 14% for men, which pushed its ratio down from 846 to 833.GB Nagar district magistrate (DM) Medha Roopam said the district’s improved ratio reflects a data correction catching up with ground realities. “Earlier, the district was still developing, and people were settling, hence the gender ratio was lower. With more people now settled here, including a large number of women working in garment factories, the SIR has corrected the data to reflect the district’s actual demographics,” she said.
