Shanti Muni 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.

Several BLOs told The Telegraph Online that many BLOs are not “tech-savvy” and that a “lack of proper training” was not only increasing the time taken to complete their tasks but also causing them “undue stress”.

What makes matters worse, they said, is that the EC app is prone to crashing during peak hours as thousands of BLOs enter data simultaneously. One BLO claimed that once the app crashes it can be hours before they can start entering data again.

“I have lost days of uploading work because of these crashes,” said a BLO from New Town near Kolkata.

The app is not computer-friendly and can only be accessed through a cellphone, the BLOs said. “We have to enter and upload all the data from our phones in the middle of visiting houses to distribute and collect the enumeration forms,” said one.

The ‘unbearable workload’ of a BLO

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.

Video Editor: Rajbir Kathait