Lucknow, India<\/strong> \u2013 Harshit Verma believes his 50-year-old father, Vijay Kumar Verma, died because he was handling an \u201cinhuman task\u201d.<\/p>\n Vijay, a contractual government teacher in Lucknow, the capital of India\u2019s Uttar Pradesh state, was hired as a booth-level officer (BLO) to conduct a revision of the voter list in his constituency, as part of an enormous electoral exercise involving millions of BLOs across the world\u2019s most populous country.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n The exercise, called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), was launched by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on November 4, across 12 states and federally governed territories, to update the electoral rolls by adding eligible voters through house-to-house enumeration and removing ineligible people. The exercise will be repeated in the remaining states in phases.<\/p>\n According to a handbook for BLOs on the ECI\u2019s website, their responsibilities range from doing house visits to identifying existing and dead voters, collecting their photos and other relevant documents, and uploading them on a designated portal. The BLOs, who are mostly government teachers or junior officials, have complained of their immense work pressure. A single mistake means the entire process of filling out the forms and uploading them has to be done again.<\/p>\n A report last week by the Spect Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank, said at least 33 BLOs have died across India since November 4, at least nine of whom took their own lives and left desperate accounts of their work pressure in their suicide notes.<\/p>\n Vijay did not die by suicide. He collapsed on November 14 while completing SIR work late at night at his home in Lucknow\u2019s Sarava village, and was rushed to hospital. He died of a brain haemorrhage 10 days later.<\/p>\n \u201cSince he had joined the BLO duty, his phone continuously rang. We saw him working from morning till late night,\u201d Vijay\u2019s sister-in-law, Shashi Verma, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Harshit, 20, said he had read text messages sent by district officials to his father, repeatedly telling him to do more work or \u201cface consequences\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cQuickly complete 200 forms. If it\u2019s less than that, you will be charged,\u201d he recalled one of the messages as saying.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have received no support from the government,\u201d Harshit told Al Jazeera, as he stood with his mother, Sangeeta Rawat, outside the Lucknow offices of the Samajwadi Party, an opposition party supporting their protest.<\/p>\n \u201cThe senior district magistrate visited us after my father\u2019s death, but only paid condolences and told me to focus on my studies,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Al Jazeera spoke to two other BLOs in Lucknow who refused to reveal their identities over fears it could invite the wrath of the government and jeopardise their jobs.<\/p>\n \u201cI have been functioning with barely two hours of sleep every day. On many days, I didn\u2019t even sleep at all,\u201d said a 45-year-old BLO who works as a teacher at a government school in Lucknow.<\/p>\n Another BLO, also a teacher at a village school in the same district, said her phone numbers have been made public and her devices now ring at odd hours. \u201cPeople call me late at night and ask me to correct their details or find if their name is in another list,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The BLO said that most people in villages do not keep an electronic version of their documents, unlike residents in cities. \u201cQuite often, when we visit these villagers to collect their details, they would take a long time going through their trunks or cupboards to find their papers. It is a common problem.\u201d<\/p>\n She said BLOs return to their homes in the evening after a long day of work and continue to upload forms online until late into the night. \u201cQuite often, the server does not work, and I upload forms at 4 in the morning to avoid this issue,\u201d the 35-year-old said.<\/p>\n \u201cI would get worried that my mobile phone\u2019s battery will run out, so I would always keep plugging it in to charge whenever possible,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n The BLOs\u2019 biggest concern, she said, was to complete their work within the one-month deadline given by the ECI, a process for which she said they were not given proper training.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just a two- [to] three-hour briefing in which we were told how to collect and upload data. That\u2019s it,\u201d the BLO in rural Lucknow said.<\/p>\n In Uttar Pradesh, the deadline to finish the SIR process has been extended twice: first to December 11, and then to December 26. The exercise ended in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat states on December 14, and will end in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, and Andaman and Nicobar on December 18.<\/p>\n The eastern state of Bihar was the first to go through a revision of its electoral rolls this year, after a gap of more than two decades. In July, the SIR was launched in Bihar before its legislative assembly elections in November, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged for the first time as the single largest party.<\/p>\n In the run-up to the polls, Bihar\u2019s opposition parties had demanded a rollback of the SIR, accusing the ECI of rushing through a mammoth electoral exercise that could render vast numbers of citizens unable to vote. In September, the ECI published its final voter list for Bihar, removing 4.7\u202fmillion names from the rolls.<\/p>\n In Seemanchal, a Muslim-majority region in Bihar\u2019s northeast, voter removals exceeded the state average, prompting allegations by opposition parties and Muslim groups that the ECI was especially targeting Muslim voters, who generally do not vote for the BJP, for removal.<\/p>\n The BJP\u2019s thumping win in Bihar triggered accusations by the losing coalition of a \u201cvote chori\u201d (\u201cchori\u201d means stealing in Hindi). Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Indian National Congress party, last month called the SIR \u201ca sinister plan of the Election Commission to destroy democracy\u201d.<\/p>\n In response, Union Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah said in a speech in parliament that the real \u201cvote chori\u201d happened under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi\u2019s great-grandfather and grandmother who were also former Indian prime ministers.<\/p>\n As the political debate over the electoral exercise ramped up, it continued to destroy lives. In Bihar, at least two BLOs died during the revision of the electoral rolls.<\/p>\n On November 9, five days after the SIR was announced in a dozen other Indian states and federal territories, Namita Handa, a 50-year-old rural health worker, died of a stroke while she was on duty in West Bengal\u2019s East Burdwan district. Her husband, Madhab Hansda, blamed the SIR workload for her sudden death.<\/p>\n On November 22, Rinku Tarafdar, a 53-year-old biology teacher recruited as a BLO, was found dead at her residence in Nadia district of West Bengal.<\/p>\n In her two-page suicide note, Tarafdar blamed the ECI. \u201cI do not support any political party, but I cannot handle this inhumane pressure anymore\u201d, she wrote, adding that she was threatened with an \u201cadministrative process\u201d if she failed to do the required work.<\/p>\n At least four BLOs died during the SIR in West Bengal. On Monday, the ECI published a draft voter list for the state, which removed about 5.8 million people. The deleted names were marked as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate voters.<\/p>\n Anuj Garg worked as a teacher in a government school in Dholpur city in the western state of Rajasthan. On the night of November 30, he fell to the ground while working at his laptop at his home and died of cardiac arrest. He was 44 and had two children.<\/p>\n \u201cHe asked for tea at around 1am, but by the time it came, we had lost him,\u201d his sister, Anjana Garg, told Al Jazeera. \u201cIn the last month, he barely ate or slept. We only saw him working without a break.\u201d<\/p>\n Anuj had previously worked as a BLO. But Anjana said the pressure this year was extraordinary. Despite working around the clock, he had received notices from his supervisors warning him to meet his targets, she said, adding that the death by suicide of another BLO in the state had added to his stress.<\/p>\n On the night of December 1, Sarvesh Singh, a 46-year-old BLO in Uttar Pradesh\u2019s Moradabad district, died by suicide while his wife and four daughters were sleeping in another room. Singh left a note and a final video, purportedly recorded by his wife.<\/p>\n \u201cI failed in this election,\u201d he said in the video, adding that he was losing his mental stability due to a lack of sleep and excessive pressure. In the note, he wrote: \u201cI used to work day and night, but still could not finish my target.\u201d<\/p>\n The ECI has rejected accusations of workloads leading to the deaths of dozens of BLOs across the country.<\/p>\n \u201cThe SIR work is very normal. It is not that the BLOs are doing it for the first time,\u201d ECI spokesman Apurva Kumar Singh told Al Jazeera, calling the deaths unfortunate. He said the work was \u201cnot overburdening at all\u201d, adding that the ECI was taking required action, without specifying what that action is.<\/p>\n The commission recently doubled the compensation for BLOs to 1,000 rupees ($11) in addition to their salaries, and announced an incentive of 6,000 rupees ($66) upon the completion of an election cycle.<\/p>\n Sapan Mondal, the general secretary of the Kolkata-based Election Staff and Booth Level Officer Forum, said the Election Commission provided no training to the BLOs before pushing them into the enormous exercise.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the BLO duty was assigned, nothing was provided, not even devices or data entry operators to help those who don\u2019t know how to work online,\u201d he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n As criticism mounted, the ECI on December 1 posted a video on its X account showing a group of BLOs dancing to \u201crelieve their stress\u201d.<\/p>\n The video added to the outrage. Social media users called the commission\u2019s move insensitive. The ECI has not officially responded to the criticism.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, petitions have been filed in several courts against the SIR by opposition politicians, victims\u2019 families and the Association for Democratic Reforms, a prominent watchdog on India\u2019s election processes.<\/p>\n Many affected families said they have been waiting for government support after losing their loved ones, who were often their sole breadwinners.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want the money we spent on our father\u2019s untimely death, and a government job for me. Are we asking for a lot?\u201d Harshit asked as he held a 200,000-rupee ($2,200) cheque given to his family by the opposition Samajwadi Party.<\/p>\nRecommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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