The special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli feels like a modern adaptation of The Comedy of Errors. But no one’s laughing.
Over 90 per cent of the booth-level officers (BLOs) engaged in the process can’t operate computers or smartphones through which the voter data need to be uploaded on the Election Commission portal.
“Over 90 per cent of the BLOs are anganwadi workers, who are required to have passed Class XII. However, none of them are able to digitise the data collected through the enumeration forms. Under pressure from the local administration, some of them are only able to enter the data of four people per day,” said a supervisor (lekhpal or revenue officer) of the BLOs in the constituency represented by Rahul Gandhi.
There are 21.27 lakh voters in Rae Bareli and 2,242 BLOs have been engaged in the SIR drive. The supervisor said work at the anganwadis had taken a back seat as the BLOs were racing against time to collect enumeration forms and upload the data by
December 9.
To complicate matters, the names of 40 per cent of voters on the 2003 list, based on which the new list needs to be updated, are spelt wrong, the supervisor said on condition of anonymity.
“For example, a villager in Bangarmau had been registered as Raju in the 2003 voter list, but his name on the Aadhaar card is Raj Kumar. There is no option to correct it. We asked our seniors, but they could not give us a conclusive reply. Around 5 per cent voters don’t remember the names of their parents. How will they fill up the forms?” he asked.
Rajiv Kumar Jaiswal, a village panchayat chief of Randhanpur, said several elderly residents didn’t remember their parents’ names.
“Nobody has enquired about their parents for the last four-five decades. They are not able to fill up the enumeration forms. The government should have involved the panchayat chief or secretary in this work. I have volunteered my help because I want the voters in my area to be added to the list. I am trying to find out the names of their parents, but I know that a large number of people would be omitted from the final list,” Jaiswal said.
The supervisor said it was impossible to complete the work within the deadline even after working 24X7.
“The EC website, where we have to upload the data, either doesn’t open or keeps crashing between 10am and 11pm because of server overload. We work at night. I have noticed that it works smoothly only between 5am and 8am. I have asked the BLOs to do the data-entry work at that time,” he said.
The supervisor said around 10 per cent of voters in the constituency had gone away to attend weddings and the BLOs were finding it difficult to track them down.
“The governments don’t understand the ground realities. They should have done this exercise in August-September. They should know that November is the wedding season,” he said.
A tehsildar (a subdivision-level revenue officer) told The Telegraph that the children of some BLOs were helping them with data entry.
“Whatever is happening in the name of SIR is impractical. The BLOs were supposed to distribute the enumeration forms by November 4, but they were printed after November 10 in Rae Bareli,” he said.
Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, a kanungo (revenue inspector), said they were working hard to ensure that every voter gets listed.
District magistrate Harshita Mathur told local reporters that they had set up a district consultancy centre to address SIR-related issues.
“We’ll also hear the disputes raised by the voters between December 9 and January 8. We hope to achieve the target within the stipulated time,” she said.
Represented by Rahul’s grandfather Feroze Gandhi from 1952 to 1960, Rae Bareli was wrested from the Congress by Raj Narain of the Janata Party in 1977 after the Emergency and by the BJP’s Ashok Singh in 1996 and 1998.
The SIR in the constituency is bound to kick up dust as Rahul continues to press on with his “vote theft” allegations against the BJP and the poll panel.