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Hyderabad: Election authorities heaved a sigh of relief on Thursday (June 18) after the Election Commission (EC) relaxed its earlier directive that enumeration forms for the upcoming special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls be printed only in Telugu throughout Telangana and gave the go-ahead for English forms solely in Hyderabad district.

Telugu forms alone will continue to be distributed in the rest of the state.

A top official, on condition of anonymity, told The Wire that the EC has permitted authorities to print the forms in English in addition to Telugu for the enumeration of voters from June 25 in Hyderabad only. Telangana is one of the 16 states and three Union territories where the process is set to begin on the 25th as part of the exercise’s third phase nationally.

The EC had earlier mandated the states to print the forms in their respective official languages to ensure that voters not well versed with English or Hindi – the official languages of the Union government – can easily understand what they say.

But Telugu, which is Telangana’s first official language, had become a bottleneck for the process in Hyderabad, where demographic data points to a substantial non-Telugu-speaking population.

The latest permission applies only to the core........

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