Shanti Muni Oraon’s husband, Sukku Ekka, usually woke up half an hour after her. She would wake up, pray and then light the fire to cook for the family before she left for work. When Ekka woke up, he would often see her cooking outside. On the morning of 19 November, when he couldn’t find her, he asked his son where she was.

“She was just here. She left a little while ago”, her son, DeSouza Ekka, said.

Ekka found his wife hanging from a tree.

He said that the previous evening, she did not freshen up as usual after returning from work as a booth-level officer (BLO) assigned to the Mal Grameen booth (101) of Jalpaiguri’s Malbazar, around 620 km north of Kolkata.

“She was distressed about one of the voters who did not fill in their details correctly,” Ekka told The Telegraph Online. She had complained of "unbearable work pressure” previously, he said.

Shanti Muni Oraon was used to handling work pressure but the SIR process – the special intensive revision of electoral rolls underway across 12 states and Union Territories – was “getting too much for her,” her daughter, Sulekha, told The Telegraph Online.

Shanti Muni Oraon, 46, used to love kids and that is why she took up a job with the Integrated Child Development Services, the family said.

She had been working as a BLO since 2016.

Since the SIR started in Bengal she used to “return home late and exhausted,” her family said.

A few days before she died, she had submitted her resignation to the joint block development officer of Malbazar, but it was rejected.

Oraon’s booth is in the heart of north Bengal’s tea gardens. The voters are primarily Scheduled Tribes more fluent in Hindi than in Bengali.

A booth level agent (BLA) – associated with the political parties, who set up camps in these areas to help voters fill their forms – said that Oraon was the only person from the booth who had access to the EC app where the voters’ details are uploaded, so she was the only one who had to do the digitisation process.

Many voters visit the camps to seek help in filling the forms but many also choose to do it themselves. The forms are in Bengali or English and their hold over Bengali isn’t very strong and thus are prone to errors. This further complicated the process of entering the data on the app, the BLA said.

“We BLAs help all those who come to the camps for help to correctly fill their forms because we are all fluent in Bengali,” the BLA told The Telegraph Online.

Oraon’s family said that although she knew how to operate the app, she wasn’t very fast so the digitisation of each voter would take around 10 minutes whereas BLOs from other booths would be able to do it in less than five.

Rinku Tarafdar, 51, a BLO from Krishnanagar’s Chapra booth 201 in Nadia, died on 22 November, because of the “unbearable workload”.

In a suicide note that was found, she had written in Bengali: “I have finished 95 per cent of the offline work but I can’t do the online work because I lack technical knowledge.

“If I can’t finish the BLO duty, I can’t bear the pressure,” she had written.

Her son told The Telegraph Online that she loved studying and kept herself engrossed in it. That is why she took up the school job of a para-teacher.

Rina Tarafdar's son (left) and husband (right) (Sourced by The Telegraph Online)

“Ever since the SIR started, she was constantly exhausted. She looked stressed, she would work till late,” he said.

Tarafdar’s husband, who had discovered her body in the morning, said their conversations had drastically reduced because of her workload.