Year Ender 2025: BLO Deaths, SIR Pressure And The Human Cost Of India’s Electoral Machinery |
It begins before sunrise, in houses where alarm clocks ring not for ambition but for duty. A government schoolteacher ties her hair, an anganwadi worker folds yesterday’s saree, a clerk swallows a blood-pressure pill. By 7 am, they are no longer teachers, caregivers or clerks. They are Booth Level Officers — BLOs — the invisible spine of India’s electoral machinery.
They step out carrying files thicker than school textbooks and phones heavier with fear than apps. Before the first door is knocked, the pressure has already arrived through WhatsApp groups buzzing with reminders, warnings and deadlines. “Target pending.” “Upload today.” “Explain delay.”
By evening, some of them will collapse. By night, a few will not return.
So far, at least 33 BLOs across six states have died — from heart attacks, suicides, collapses on duty and accidents while rushing to meet impossible targets. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, designed on paper to “purify” democracy, has on the ground begun to erase the very people tasked with implementing it.
The Election Commission’s language is sterile. Its handbook is not.
On page 56 of the 161-page manual titled Handbook for Booth Level Officers, a BLO is told how to process claims and objections — Form 6, Form 7, signatures, countersignatures and eligibility checks. The text is dense, legalistic and unforgiving. It assumes time, training, literacy, digital access and physical stamina. It assumes, above all, that the person reading it is not human enough to break.
This manual is just one among a mound of literature the BLO is expected not only to read but to imbibe daily — alongside........