West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Manoj Agarwal will hold an all-party meeting to address concerns over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise of electoral rolls on Tuesday. The pan-Indian exercise will begin in 12 states, including West Bengal, on November 4. The enumeration forms will be printed in the Bengali language for the benefit of rural and Bengali-speaking voters.
There are eight recognised or registered political parties in the state, and Booth Level Agents (BLAs) from each political party will assist Block Level Officers (BLOs) assigned by the Election Commission (EC). There are currently 80,681 booths across West Bengal, and one BLO per polling booth, and there can be 6,45,448 BLAs. There will be an increase in the number of polling booths in the upcoming polls as the Commission has limited the number of voters per booth to 1,200.
Once the SIR process begins on November 4, BLAs will assist BLOs in the door-to-door process of submitting and collecting enumeration forms, and in cases where the BLO has not been able to collect the forms, each BLA is authorised to collect 50 enumeration forms from voters and submit them to the BLOs.
The Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) will be trained virtually by the EC starting Tuesday, while the BLOs will be trained on the ground at the district level by the District Magistrates (DMs) and Sub-Divisional Officers (SDOs). The training process is to be completed by November 3.
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The progeny mapping has already been completed across 23 districts of West Bengal, and around 52 per cent voters’ names currently match the 2002 list, when the SIR was last conducted in the state. The progeny mapping includes linkage to parents and grandparents in cases where the voter’s name is not in the 2002 list. There are currently 7.6 crore voters in West Bengal.
The door-to-door SIR process is to be completed across 12 states by December 4, while the final electoral list will be published by February 7.