KOLKATA: An Assistant Electoral Registration Officer (AERO) in Howrah district in West Bengal resigned in protest against procedures related to logical discrepancies found in enumeration forms (EFs) of voters during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the State.
She charged that this is a ploy to disenfranchise a large section of marginal people in society.
The AERO Mousumi Sarkar, a West Bengal Civil Service (WBCS) executive in the rank of Block Development Officer (BDO), resigned on January 8.
In her resignation letter, Mousumi stated, “The Logical discrepancies appeared in the BLO apps due to sporadic errors in the conversion of the PDF of the 2002 Electoral Roll (last SIR in West Bengal) data to CSV (Comma-Separated Values) files, as admitted by the Additional Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal in his letter vide Memo No: 51 16 -Home (Elec) dated 29.12.25.”
“The spelling of the names of 2002 was taken as 'sacrosanct'. However, in reality, many names were corrected through Form 8, later in accordance with the rules of ECI. This was the major cause for father name mismatch in cases of progeny mapping,” the letter stated.
“In many cases, the age and sex of the names of 2002 were flawed. Those were also corrected through Form 8 later in accordance with the rules of ECI,” it stated.
Form 8 refers to an application for correction to particulars entered in the electoral roll.
In many cases, names of voters appeared as ‘Ya’, she highlighted in the letter, adding that in India, one could hardly find anybody bearing these kinds of names.
“As a responsible citizen, I think this kind of logical discrepancies does not make any sense, and this is a ploy to disenfranchise a large section of marginal people of the society, who do not have any of the twelve documents required by ECI to prove the veracity of their deposition through Enumeration Forms," the letter added.
“Therefore, I want to tender my resignation from the post of AERO so that I would have the consolation that I have not betrayed my countrymen and nation consciously. At the same time, I want to state that I am ready to carry out other duties entrusted to me by ECI as and when required,” she stated in her letter.
The move comes just six days ahead of hearings related to logical discrepancies scheduled in the Bagnan block.
It is learnt that Mousumi sent a letter to the concerned Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) Achintya Kumar Mondal seeking to relieve her from the AERO post.
The ERO forwarded the letter to the Howrah district magistrate (DM) P Deepapriya, assigned as the district electoral officer (DEO) by the Election Commission of India (ECI), seeking clearance.
Her resignation has created a row in the office of the state Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Manoj Agarwal.