The Uttar Pradesh bar council deleted more than half of the state's enrolled advocate strength from its provisional electoral roll, which now consists of around 1.6 lakh advocates who will be eligible to vote in its upcoming bar elections.

Bar Council of India (BCI) member from UP, Dinesh Pathak, told us yesterday that the UP SBC has already circulated the provisional electoral roll to all bar associations in the state and has given them 10 days to file objections. There are 242 bar associations across UP, with nine in Kanpur alone.

After the objection period, the SBC will submit its final electoral roll to the BCI before 2 February in order to proceed with elections.

Pathak said that the 1.6 lakh advocates on its electoral roll include both practising and non-practising advocates. All advocates had made it to the electoral roll, whose enrollment documents, including declaration forms (stating whether they have sat for the bar exam if enrolled after 2010), were accepted by the SBC.

This is in contrast to Karnataka where, as we reported yesterday, only practising advocates made it to the electoral roll.

Pathak said that through the advocate verification drive the SBC ended up removing 1.3 lakh advocates that did not submit their verification.

Pathak is one of the four members of the special committee constituted by the BCI under Section 8-A of the Advocates Act 1961, which provides for the procedure to run SBCs in the absence of elected representatives.

UP advocate general and senior advocate Raghavendra Singh and advocates Shrinath Tripathi and Praveen Kumar are the other two members of this committee.

As we reported earlier this week, the Maharashtra and Goa bar councilhas yet to finalise its electoral roll but has 1.11 lakh verified advocates on its state rolls, having removed 76,000 after its verification drive.

The Karnataka state bar council has reduced its numbers to 43,566 from around 85,000, we had reported yesterday.