The website of the chief electoral officer of West Bengal was unavailable since Tuesday morning, less than 12 hours after chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar listed the state among those where the special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls is to start from Tuesday.
Multiple clicks on http://www.ceowestbengal.nic.in threw the same result. A single sentence on the left corner of the page: The service is unavailable. A little while later, that message changed to “HTTP Error 404. The requested resource is not found.”
About two hours later, the home page opened but the link to the 2002 SIR electoral roll was still unavailable.
Finally, at 12:57 PM the website was accessible on some devices.
The CEO’s website assumes significance in the wake of the SIR exercise that has been rolled out for the nearly 7.62 crore voters in the state which will go have Assembly elections next summer.
The website of the state’s chief electoral officer contains information including the vital electoral rolls which the electors must scour to find out whether the names of the voter and family members eligible for voting are included in the rolls or not. ‘
With the SIR in place, the website assumes even more significance as the voters are also expected to check the 2002 electoral rolls (that was the year when the last similar exercise was undertaken in Bengal).
Post-SIR in 2002, 4.58 crore voters were enrolled in the final draft of the electoral rolls in Bengal.
The Election Commission had announced on Monday that voters can fill in the form online and link it to the previous SIR electoral rolls on voters.eci.gov.in.
“The website is working erratically,” said Congress leader Prasenjit Bose. “I have been trying for an hour to find some of the voters in my constituency.”
Bose said an elderly person had approached him on Tuesday morning to help with the matching in the previous SIR.
“That exercise happened before delimitation. The name of the constituency, polling station and even the polling booth number has changed,” Bose said. "Finding names of the voters has become a challenge."
A day after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had “exposed” the presence of duplicate voters in multiple voter lists across Karnataka, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, some of the websites were allegedly inaccessible.
Gyanesh Kumar, the CEC, had said on Monday: “The pre-enumeration phase, which will start tonight at 12am, involves computer matching and linking with the previous SIR through ECI Net.”
The state chief electoral officer Manoj Agarwal could not be reached despite multiple attempts.
