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Kolkata, Nov 26 (IANS) The digitization of enumeration forms in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal indicates that the number of voters to be removed from the rolls will be much higher than the Election Commission’s initial estimate.
Initially, when the digitization of filled enumeration forms collected by booth-level officers (BLOs) began, the Election Commission estimated that around 10 lakh names would be removed from the voter list.
However, by Tuesday evening, digitization trends showed that names of 14 lakh voters had been detected to have been deleted.
An official from the Chief Electoral Officer’s office said the work is still in progress, as many forms are yet to be collected and digitized.
A source in the West Bengal CEO office said, “The process of digitization of already collected enumeration forms is still going on. A number of enumeration forms are yet to be collected from voters, after which they will also be digitalised. So in all likelihood, the final number of excluded voters will be more than the initial estimate of 10 lakh on this count.”
He said that the situation will become clear after the release of the draft voter list on December 9. The Commission had set November 30 as the deadline to complete digitization and directed each BLO to upload at least 150 filled forms in a day through the BLO app.
The source further said the deletions will include dead, duplicate entries where a voter’s name appears in two locations, voters who have permanently relocated to another state, and voters who are missing or could not be located.
The total number of voters in West Bengal as on October 27 is 7,66,37,529, which shows that 2,25,546 enumeration forms are yet to be distributed.
The SIR began on November 4 and the entire exercise is expected to be completed by the end of March next year.
Meanwhile, West Bengal Governor CV Anand Bose issued strong remarks on the protest by a section of BLOs over SIR workload outside the office of the Chief Electoral Officer.
The Governor said, “These are issues which the administration will have to pay attention to. If there is any failure on their part, I will definitely intervene.”
–IANS
src/snj/skp