The Election Commission of India (ECI) appears incapable of disentangling itself from the mounting controversy over its Special Revision Exercise (SIR) of electoral rolls across the country. After being accused by the Opposition of deleting and adding voters by ramming through the SIR on the eve of the recent Bihar polls, enabling the ruling BJP and its allies to score a landslide victory, a new battlefront has opened. Now embarked on a SIR of electoral rolls in 12 states and Union Territories, it is confronted with a virtual revolt by Booth Level Officers (BLOs), government employees drafted for the revision exercise, who are complaining that they are being asked to do too much in too little time.

The exercise, which involves laborious door-to-door verification, data collection, and digitisation of voter records, often disrupted by faulty wireless networks, has been compressed into an impossibly tight schedule. BLO employee unions, backed by local political leaders, are complaining that a process that traditionally spans years has been forced into a two-month window, creating impractical targets. This unprecedented work pressure on a variety of government employees, who are forced to do extra election duties along with their regular work and are often harassed by their supervisors with impossible deadlines, has led to a series of deaths of BLOs across the 12 states and union territories in the throes of Special Intensive Revision over the past month.

There is growing furore linking an inept electoral administrative........

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