The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls has scrapped as many as 2 lakh names in East Burdwan, the draft electoral rolls released today have revealed.
The 16 Assembly segments of East Burdwan had 41,78,695 voters prior to the SIR process. East Burdwan District Magistrate and District Electoral Officer Ayesha Rani A said today: “After scrutiny of the submitted enumeration forms, the figure has come down to 39,70,620.” A total of 2,08,075 names have been deleted.
Of them, around one lakh voters died and another 1.1 lakh fell under ‘no mapping’ category, as they, or their parents or their grandparents, did not exist in the 2002 electoral rolls. Most of such ‘no mapping’ category voters were detected in Bardhaman (Dakshin) Assembly constituency (5.38 per cent), and the least in Mongalkote constituency (0.74 per cent).
In Durgapur (Paschim) Assembly constituency, 33,565 names have been discarded. Among them are 10 voters who have surprisingly been marked as ‘missing’, even though they had submitted their filled-up enumeration forms.
Rusali Singh (23) of Natunpally’s Ward 14 in Durgapur (Paschim) works at a private organisation in Chennai. She, like her neighbours Rakhi Batabyal, Shraboni Mandi and her husband Sanjib Mandi, had submitted their enumeration forms. They complained: “We were still marked as missing voters in the draft list.” They are voters of Booth No. 70 there.
A school teacher, Lakhindar Mukherjee, was assigned as the Booth Level Officer. After he had fallen sick, his wife Reba Mukherjee, helped out. “I was assisting my husband in the job without any training.” One Anganwadi worker Shilpi Banik was assigned as the Additional BLO for the ward. She said: “I didn’t have any training for the job. I was helpless.” She, however, said she had uploaded Rusali’s form, “as far as I can recollect”.
All the grievances will now be taken up by the respective BLOs, who have till January 10 to carry out the rectifications, provided the voters whose names have not appeared in the draft list, approach them with all relevant documents, the DEO said