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Kolkata, Nov 23 (IANS) The Election Commission of India (ECI) has received several complaints against officials of several government schools in West Bengal for not exempting their teachers from regular teaching duties to work as booth-level officers (BLOs) for special intensive vetting in the state.
The BLOs, who are basically teachers attached to various government schools in West Bengal, have complained that the school authorities are not respecting the Commission’s order, which states that as long as the SIR exercise continues, the BLOs should not be hampered in completing their regular assignments and instead they should be released for BLO duties.
These teacher-BLOs have complained that they are “forced” to attend to their regular teaching work in the first half and then go out for BLO duties in the second half.
He said that this is not only increasing the excessive work pressure but is also affecting the process of collection of enumeration forms distributed among voters, digitization of those forms and uploading through the BLO app.
Sources in the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, said, “The ECI is looking into the complaints against school officials very seriously and will soon communicate with the state government to direct them to relieve the teachers from their regular workload to perform BLO duties.”
Another complaint the ECI is receiving from BLOs is that excessive pressure on the servers is often slowing down the process of uploading enumeration forms, making it difficult for BLOs to meet the Commission’s target of uploading a minimum of 150 forms per day.
“The commission has directed its technical team to address the issue and the matter will be resolved soon,” sources in the CEO’s office said.
According to the data released from the CEO office, till 6 pm on Saturday, digitization of 3.15 crore calculation forms has been completed.
According to the voter list till October 27, the total number of voters in West Bengal is 7,66,37,529.
The Commission had set the deadline to complete the process of digitization of calculation forms by November 30.
The entire SIR process is expected to be completed by March next year.
Earlier, SIR was conducted in West Bengal in 2002.
–IANS
source/svn