The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) sweeping changes in the special intensive revision has left booth-level officers, many of whom are government school teachers, struggling to balance their classroom responsibilities with new duties to visit every voter’s home and collect documents – especially in the middle of exam season.
On Saturday, ECI announced large-scale changes in the SIR procedure, saying voters issued notices “for being unmapped and logical discrepancies” will no longer need to appear for a personal hearing before the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO). BLOs will visit such voters at home to collect documents, which will be uploaded to the ECINet portal “for decision by the ERO.”
“It has been extremely hectic. “People expect us to visit them at their convenience. “There is a due process that has to be followed. we have to collect acknowledgement, get a photo clicked and then while collecting documents, we have to click a selfie, upload those documents online and properly scrutinise them While serving a notice.
During the enumeration exercise, we were exempted from teaching work but this time, it has become tough considering that my workload has doubled and the working hours have also gone up from seven hours to nearly 13 hours,” said a 38-year-old Urdu teacher at a government school in Okhla. Some people ask me to visit at 9 pm, some at 7 pm,” he said. A 50-year-old government teacher in East Delhi’s Krishna Nagar, who requested anonymity, said a combination of camps and home visits could have reduced the burden on BLOs.
Because of the procedure involved in serving notices and collecting documents, another BLO from Okhla said each visit can take between 15 and 20 minutes.
It is an extremely sensitive task,” he said. “Earlier people were coming with their notices to the camp, and we were visiting homes of elderly people or people with disability, but ever since ECI has said that BLOs will visit homes, people have stopped coming completely,” she said.
A hearing will be held “only in exceptional circumstances, as decided by the ERO,” and will “preferably” be conducted online, with such facilities to be strengthened. The commission said “any adult member of the family can be authorised by the elector to attend the hearing on their behalf, if required.”
