Booth-level officers (BLOs), many of them government school teachers and other local government employees, are struggling to manage their regular duties alongside an expanded workload under the Election Commission of India's (ECI) ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
The pressure has increased after the ECI changed the procedure for voters who receive notices for being unmapped or having logical discrepancies. Instead of routinely requiring such voters to appear before the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO), BLOs will now visit their homes, collect documents and upload them to the ECINet portal for the ERO's decision.
The changes have come during the school examination period, leaving several BLOs who are teachers to balance classroom work, checking answer sheets and preparing results with evening visits to voters' homes.
Home visits replace routine personal hearings
Under the revised procedure announced by the ECI on September 26, voters issued notices for being unmapped or having logical discrepancies will generally not be required to appear personally before the ERO or Assistant Electoral Registration Officer (AERO).
Instead, BLOs will collect the required documents from their homes and upload them on ECINet. Personal hearings will be held only in exceptional circumstances, as decided by the ERO, and will preferably be conducted online. An elector can also authorise an adult family member to attend a hearing on their behalf.
The change followed concerns raised over the notice process, including a September 24 communication from Maharashtra's chief electoral officer seeking greater discretion for EROs and exemptions from personal hearings where satisfactory documents had already been submitted.
While the new arrangement is intended to reduce the need for voters to travel to government offices, BLOs say it has shifted a significant part of the workload to them.
In Delhi, 14,947 BLOs are expected to visit the homes of around 3.3 million people flagged under the logical discrepancy and non-mapping categories linked to the 2002 rolls.
Several BLOs told HT that the current stage was more demanding than the enumeration exercise because they had been exempted from teaching duties during that phase.
A 38-year-old Urdu teacher at a government school in Okhla said his workload had doubled and his working day had increased from about seven hours to nearly 13 hours. His school operates from 12.30 pm to 6.30 pm. Before school, he manages household responsibilities, including grocery shopping and dropping and collecting his children. After completing his teaching and academic duties, he visits voters in the evenings and often reaches home around 10 pm, when he still has about 200 mid-term examination answer sheets to check.
He said voters often expected him to visit according to their convenience, with some asking him to come at 7 pm and others at 9 pm.
Another BLO in Okhla said each visit could take 15 to 20 minutes because of the procedure involved. BLOs have to serve the notice, collect an acknowledgement, take a photograph, obtain documents, click a selfie while collecting them, upload the documents and scrutinise them.
Teachers juggle SIR work with examinations
A 50-year-old government teacher in East Delhi's Krishna Nagar said the workload could have been reduced through a combination of camps and home visits.
She said that earlier, voters would bring notices to camps while BLOs visited elderly people and persons with disabilities at home. Since the ECI directed BLOs to visit the homes of people who received notices, she said, fewer people were coming to the camps.
With mid-term examinations under way, she is also required to check answer sheets and prepare results alongside her SIR duties.
Another teacher in Mayur Vihar described the current academic session as the hardest of her seven-year career. She said census-related work had taken up her summer vacation, after which she was assigned SIR duties and subsequently had to continue with the exercise following its extension.
The 32-year-old said her day typically began at 7 am and continued at school until 1 pm, followed by voter visits until around 6 or 6.30 pm. She said the workload had also affected her domestic responsibilities and left her with only a few hours of sleep.
The concerns are not confined to Delhi. HT spoke to at least 10 BLOs in seven states where the claims and objections period for SIR is under way. All were working in regular jobs as local government or semi-government employees.
In Telangana, 9.2 million voters were issued notices. Around six million cases involved anomalies such as mismatches in names and ages, while 3.2 million voters were unmapped with the base roll. The state has around 36,000 BLOs.
A Hyderabad BLO who works as an anganwadi worker said she could visit voters only before or after her regular working hours. She said some voters were not at home when she arrived, while others did not have complete documents, forcing repeat visits. She also raised concerns about the safety of making late-evening visits as a woman.
In Maharashtra, 12.2 million people were flagged for notices, while the state has around 100,300 BLOs. Karnataka has an estimated 4.3 million electors in the no-mapping and anomalies categories against about 59,050 BLOs.
BLOs also tasked with helping excluded voters
The workload extends beyond serving notices and collecting documents. BLOs will also have to assist people whose names are excluded from the draft electoral rolls in filling out Form-6 for re-inclusion.
A second Hyderabad BLO said no separate time had been provided for the additional work. She said employees had to complete their regular responsibilities before starting election-related duties, with both sets of work carrying deadlines.
State chief electoral officer offices have said that decisions on the allocation and delegation of work are not within their control. A Telangana CEO official said orders and work allocation came from higher levels, while complaints relating to technical glitches or document-related issues were addressed as quickly as possible.
The ECI has defended the role of BLOs, saying they have always carried out election-related work at the grassroots level.
An ECI official said the commission did not have permanent staff at the BLO level and that such officers had handled election work even before SIR. The official described BLOs as “supremely important” to the electoral system and said the commission valued their contribution.
The ECI has also directed district election officers to establish help desks and hold special camps for people living in night shelters, labourers, poor people and homeless persons. It has said voters whose names are left out during or after SIR, including young and first-time voters, can seek inclusion through continuous updation.
The Commission's latest changes have therefore shifted the practical burden of resolving many SIR notices towards field-level officials, even as teachers and other BLOs continue with their regular employment responsibilities.