A large number of voters in Bengal are struggling to fill out enumeration forms as the state’s 2002 electoral rolls, essential for the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR), are not searchable online.
Unlike most states, where post-SIR rolls can be easily searched by name or EPIC number, Bengal’s 2002 voter list has been uploaded in PDF format on the chief electoral officer’s website ceowestbengal.wb.gov.in. This format requires users to manually browse through the documents.
As a result, voters need to log in to the website and then search for districts. Once in the district section, voters need to go to the Assembly segment where they or their parents were voters in 2002 and finally to the booth where they had cast their votes to get the full list of voters of that particular booth and find names from a list of about 1,000 voters.
“This is a complicated process. We are facing the same question in at least two houses out of five where we went to distribute the enumeration forms in the first two days. We are trying to help the voters, but it appears to be a problem as many of the voters can’t remember the name of the booth where they had voted in the 2004 general election,” said a booth-level officer in Burdwan.
Several other problems have also cropped up during the first two days of the SIR exercise.
For example, Kalyani Majumdar, 62, a resident of Bolpur in Birbhum, said she could not find her name in the electoral rolls of 2002 as she could not find the booth where she had cast her vote in the last few elections.
“I used to cast my vote in the Ruppur gram panchayat office booth in the last few elections. But I could not find my name in the rolls of the booth in 2002. Later, I was told by a political leader that the venue I had cast my vote in 2002 — Visva Bharati Khadi and Gramodyog Bhavan — does not exist anymore. All the voters of the booth have been clubbed into the booth where I cast my vote for the past few elections,” said Kalyani.
Another voter, Kalyan Roy, 32, who works in Bangalore and hails from Chinsurah in Hooghly, said that he was not a voter in 2002, but his father was. Now, he could not find the details of his father in the 2002 list, as he did not know the name of the booth where his father had cast his vote in the 2004 elections, since he died a few years ago.
As the electoral rolls are not in a searchable format in Bengal, the BLOs said that electors, particularly elderly and those who are not tech-savvy, were facing the problem the most.
When The Telegraph contacted the CEO’s office to understand the reasons why the electoral rolls could not be made searchable like in many other states, an official said that since the 2002 list was not digitised, it could not be made searchable.
“We had contacted the EC’s IT wings and informed them of the problem, but we were told that as the rolls of Bengal were not digitised, it would take at least 2 to 3 months to convert them to a format where electors could search their details by putting his or her name or EPIC number. We are still in search of an agency which can make the lists searchable in a short period,” said the official.
A section of bureaucrats said that since the Election Commission, while announcing the SIR dates for Bihar on June 24, had declared that SIR would be carried out across the country, special initiatives should have been taken to digitise the 2002 lists of Bengal immediately.
“If that was done on time, the electors of Bengal would not have to run to the camps of the political parties to get to know whether they or their parents figure in the 2002 list,” said a bureaucrat.