The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Monday, directed district electoral officers (DEOs) to not issue notices to voters identified as "unmapped" in the BLO app due to technical issues linked to the digitisation of the 2002 electoral rolls during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in West Bengal.
More than 32 lakh voters in the state, who could not trace themselves, their parents, or grandparents in the 2002 electoral rolls have been asked to appear before hearings that commenced from December 27.
However, the Election Commission clarified that hearings have been paused for a specific category of voters whose names were not traced by the Commission's central software system but were found in the hard copies of the 2002 electoral rolls. The pause does not apply to genuinely "unmapped" cases flagged by electoral registration officers (EROs) after on-ground verification.
According to sources in the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Manoj Agarwal, “Though hearing notices may have been generated from the central software system for such cases, these electors should not be called for hearing or hearing notices so generated in such cases need not be served, and instead be kept with the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO)/Assistant Electoral Registration Officer (AERO).”
The EC’s fresh instructions, issued through the CEO’s office, explained that the problem stemmed from technical limitations during the digitisation of the 2002 electoral rolls. The rolls, originally available in PDF format, were not fully converted into CSV files, resulting in linkage failures in the Booth-Level Officer (BLO) app.
As a result, several electors were incorrectly marked as “unmapped” in the system, even though they had valid self or progeny linkage with the physical copies of the 2002 rolls, which had already been authenticated by DEOs and published on the CEO’s website.
Officials said that when poll authorities cross-verified the hard copies of the 2002 rolls on the ground, they found that many voters or their children flagged as “unmapped” by the EC’s software were present in the physical records.
The CEO’s office stated that hearing notices auto-generated in such cases need not be served and should be retained at the level of the ERO or AERO. Extracts of the 2002 electoral rolls may instead be forwarded to the concerned DEO for verification in line with Election Commission guidelines.
Upon verification, EROs or AEROs may take appropriate decisions and upload the required documents for the disposal of the cases.
The directive also allows BLOs to be deputed for field verification, including taking photographs of the electors concerned for uploading into the system.
“This directive might be for the time being. If it is felt that hearings are at all required in some cases, that will be done only after a proper verification,” an official told PTI.
The EC, however, clarified that if discrepancies are detected at a later stage, either during scrutiny of the hard copies of the 2002 electoral rolls or upon receipt of complaints, the electors concerned may be called for hearings after due service of notices.
The instructions have been circulated to all DEOs as part of the ongoing SIR exercise in West Bengal, with the aim of ensuring accuracy of electoral rolls while addressing technical constraints arising from legacy data integration.
On the other hand, in another significant development, the ECI on Monday decided not to allow Booth Level Agents-2 (BLAs-2) of political parties inside the venue of hearings.
The Commission was prompted to take this step after Trinamool Congress MLA Asit Majumder allegedly stopped the hearing process in his Chinsurah constituency in Hooghly district on Monday, demanding the entry of a BLA-2 inside the venue.
He reportedly got involved in a heated exchange with the concerned block development officer (BDO) over the issue.
On Sunday, TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, had asked party BLAs to remain inside camps during hearings. He also threatened legal action if BLAs were not allowed during the hearings.
Asit Majumder said BLAs-2 are meant to assist voters if they face problems during SIR hearings. “I demanded that a BLA-2 should be allowed inside the camp so that no genuine voter’s name is deleted from the electoral rolls during hearings,” he said.
(WIth inputs from Express News Service)