A Trinamool Congress delegation met Bengal chief electoral officer (CEO) Manoj Agarwal on Saturday and submitted a memorandum to him, demanding the extension of the deadline for uploading filled-in enumeration forms for the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

Trinamool said the deadline needed to be extended as the uploading was hindered by the malfunctioning of the BLO app and the lack of training for booth-level officers.

“We have submitted a memorandum to the CEO mentioning that the BLOs will not be able to upload the filled-in enumeration forms before the deadline, which is December 4, as the BLO app is not functioning properly. The digitisation exercise was also hit hard as the BLOs were not imparted the required training,” said Chandrima Bhattacharya, the minister of state (independent charge), finance department, after holding a meeting with the CEO.

She said Trinamool had demanded an extension of the deadline, otherwise four out of five electors would have to face a hearing in Bengal.

The delegation also told the CEO that if the malfunctioning of the BLO app continued, it would be impossible to upload 7.66 crore enumeration forms before December 4.

The special revision of the electoral rolls started on November 4, and the house-to-house enumeration process will continue till December 4.

“According to the data available with the Election Commission, 7.64 crore forms have already been distributed, and 3.07 crore filled-in forms have already been uploaded by the BLOs. It appears that there is enough time to complete the digitisation of the enumeration forms,” said a source on the poll panel.

Aroop Biswas, the state power minister, who was also in the delegation that met the CEO, said that they had raised certain points before the EC.

“The post-SIR list of 2002 included several errors. We have found that the names of many voters were missing from the list that was uploaded to the CEO’s website. This was evident when we matched the hard copies of the same booths with the list uploaded to the CEO’s website. This was being done intentionally as the EC was working to help a certain political party,” said Biswas.

He also said that the EC was carrying out an exercise in two months that should have been done in two years.

“We have already lost three BLOs who died because of the inhuman workload. This was being done only to give favour to a political party that has a target to delete two crore voters’ names from the electoral rolls in Bengal,” said Biswas.

An official in the CEO’s office said that all grievances related to the workload on the BLOs were being addressed.

“If any BLO has health issues, it would definitely be considered. But the problem occurred only because the state government was delaying approval to appoint 1,000 data entry operators to assist the BLOs in uploading the filled-in enumeration forms,” said a source.