On ECINet platform, access for States can be switched off and on centrally: report

ECINet, the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) comprehensive digital platform, has a feature through which viewing of enumeration form details is enabled State by State. This means that access for State Nodal Officers (SNOs) could be switched off anytime making it a centralised platform, according to an audit by ‘Charchagram’, a civic tech initiative.

The report assumes significance in view of objections raised by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi over the centralisation of ECINet and the electoral roll database.

The ECINET has a dedicated State Nodal Officer management area (create, manage, update) with a built-in disable action, according to the report, authored by Saurav Rajput, a data scientist and an alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta.

Also Read | Congress accuses Election Commission of ‘lying’ over ECINet; seeks accountability

Enable, disable buttons

As far as State-level access was concerned, ECINET has an SNO module behind the official login. Each SNO row has a disable button and the disable pop-up says: “On disabling this State Nodal Officer, the user will no longer be able to access the application.”

Separately, the code has a message: “View enumeration form details is not enabled for selected State”. This in effect means that viewing the enumeration form can be switched on or off State by State which in turn means that access for State Nodal Officers (SNOs) can be switched off.

“ECINET has a dedicated SNO management area (create, manage, update) with a built-in disable action. Its confirmation text warns that once an SNO is disabled, the user can no longer access the application. This seems a full account-level block. The text doesn’t describe a partial restriction or a role downgrade”.

The feature can be switched on and off per State, and for States where it is not enabled, officials get a message “View Enumeration Form Details is not enabled for selected State” instead of the form details.

Also Read | New ECINET options speed up disposal of SIR notices, but several EROs divided on clearing cases without documents

Portal started in January

While it was not clear since when this feature was available on ECINet, it might be recalled that the portal itself was launched in January 2026. The ECINET is ECI’s unified portal for officials. It joins many small apps under one login like the user management, ERONET, RTI module, and the Enumeration Form Tracker for SIR. Mr. Rajput said he could locate the feature since September 28.

Officials sign in through the Official Login option at the top right. After logging in, they get many options and features that we cannot see without an account.

Some of its features, options and text elements that sit behind the official login can be seen and understood from the front-end code.

The login page loads a large JavaScript file before anyone logs in. Anyone can open it. Some of it carries labels, menu names, screen routes and API paths meant for officials only, but can be read by anyone publicly.

“We only read files the site serves to everyone. In an ideal situation, we should be able to fetch the code of features which are only available on a screen. But here even some features which are sitting behind the login credentials are available in the front-end code,” he said.

The audit says ECINET also carries a feature that can bar Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant EROs (AEROs) only in West Bengal from reviewing voters’ enumeration forms and viewing the notice-and-hearing dashboard.

On its part, the Congress party said: “It is by now well-established how [CEC] Gyanesh Kumar, at the instance and instructions of the PM (Narendra Modi) and the HM (Amit Shah), put in place ECINET to centralise all manipulations of the election process.”

“The law establishes that EROs have statutory authority over the electoral roll. But across the country, the ECINET system and the Election Commission’s IT division have overruled and violated these safeguards,” Congress general secretary (communications) Jairam Ramesh said in a post on X.