Two camps – one with an enquiry desk and a trickle of visitors, the other spilling over with officials and their volunteers huddled around cellphones. The first camp, at the Block Development Office in Sitamarhi’s Parihar block, is for electors left out of Bihar’s draft roll; the other camp, at an adjoining school, is to help officials upload documents of potential voters.
As part of the second phase of the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), electors and political parties have time until September 1 to make claims and raise objections to the draft roll published on August 1. It’s also a window Booth Level Officers (BLOs) across the state have to upload the documents – one of the 11 mandated by the EC – that potential voters had to attach with their enumeration forms.
On a weekday afternoon, Baidyanath Mahto turns up at the camp at the Block Development Office. Mahto, who sells spices in Delhi’s Rithala, had come home to his village in Sitamarhi district last week to find his name and that of his wife struck off the draft roll – one of the 65 lakh deletions from the electoral rolls in the state.
At the camp for BLOs set up at the government high school in Sitamarhi’s Parihar block.
Standing outside the camp, Mahto holds pre-printed enumeration forms, his wife’s and his own. But these are of no use now. An official on duty hands him a Form 6 copy and asks him to fill that up instead.
“We moved to Delhi two years ago and before that, we were in Nagaland for years, but our votes have always been in our village. Now, my name has been struck off after the BLO marked me ‘absent’. I’ll have to apply as a new voter all over again,” he says.
According to Sitamarhi data, nearly 2.45 lakh people in the district have been deleted in the first phase – marked as absent, shifted or dead by the BLOs.
According to the EC order of June 24, all 7.89 crore registered electors of Bihar were required to fill enumeration forms and declarations by July 25 to remain on the draft roll. BLOs appointed by the EC were meant to go house-to-house to hand out the enumeration forms and then go back and collect them too.
Releasing the draft roll on August 1, the EC declared that 65 lakh names had been deleted – many among them migrants such as Mahto who had been marked “absent” by the BLOs.
The crowd at the camp barely picks up, with people walking in at infrequent intervals. While officials attribute this to the robustness of the exercise, saying there have been few claims and objections so far, on the ground, The Indian Express came across voters with little clarity of the process or their status on the rolls.
Outside the Block Development Officer’s room, walls are plastered with lists of those names deleted from the draft rolls.
An official says though the camp was meant to help deleted voters such as Mahto get back on the list, many of the enquiries have been from new voters.
Among those at the camp is 19-year-old Sumit Kumar, who has come to check the status of his Form 6 online application that he submitted on July 17. Unaware of the SIR drive then, Sumit had got the form filled at a cyber cafe, giving his Aadhaar as proof.
Under the EC’s SIR order, while all existing electors have to submit enumeration forms, those added to the rolls after 2003 have to also submit documents from an EC-mandated list of 11 to establish their eligibility. All new enrollment forms such as Sumit’s have to be accompanied by a declaration and one of the 11 documents, which does not include Aadhaar.
“They are saying my application has been rejected. I only attached my Aadhaar. Now they are asking me to fill another form and give my matriculation certificate and my father’s identity proof. I’ll have to come back,” he says.
Dhanuriya Devi has come to the camp to get her son enrolled as a first-time voter. She’s carrying his matriculation certificate and a photograph, but is sent back, with the officials asking her to come back with the correct booth number. As part of the SIR drive, the number of booths in Bihar went up by about 20,000, leading to several booths getting new serial numbers.
Confusion at camp for BLOs
At the government high school next door, the camp for BLOs sees frenetic activity. The camp has been especially set up for 77 BLOs, whose progress in uploading the documents has been identified as “slow”.
The BLOs, with helpers assigned to them, are busy on their phones as they make multiple attempts to upload the documents on the EC’s BLO App. With a large number of BLOs being teachers and anganwadi helpers, some of the women officials are accompanied by their sons and husbands.
An official at the camp says nearly 80 per cent of the documents have been uploaded so far and that he’s confident the task will be completed by September 1. The BLOs who did not do their due diligence in the first phase, when they had to go house-to-house to collect the forms, are the ones facing problems now, he says.
The BLOs were initially asked to upload the supporting documents along with the enumeration forms, but later, the EC clarified that documents could be submitted in the second phase too.
“Some BLOs did not fill forms with proper documents. Now, in the verification phase, they are facing difficulties but we will ensure the work is done properly,” says the official.