Tale of two cities: 'VIP voters' cleared for final rolls; elsewhere, it's livelihoods vs vote

Several VIPs including Jaishankar, Dhankhar, Upendra Dwivedi have been validated and prepared for inclusion in the final rolls

NEW DELHI: Electoral entries of prominent voters in New Delhi assembly constituency who received notices during the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) have been validated and parked for inclusion in the final electoral rolls after district poll officials verified their details and supporting documents.Those who received SIR notices included former Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar, BJP veteran L K Advani, external affairs minister S Jaishankar, Delhi ex-chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, former deputy CM Manish Sisodia, senior advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Kapil Sibal, foreign secretary Vikram Misri, former NITI Aayog vice-chairperson Arvind Panagariya, BJP MLA Kailash Gahlot, former army chief Gen Upendra Dwivedi, CBI director Praveen Sood and Delhi’s ex-lieutenant governor Najeeb Jung, among several other names from bureaucracy and politics.SIR notices to ‘VIP voters’, as they are usually referred to by election officials, had attracted attention earlier this week over why their names had been flagged during the roll revision exercise.“Based on the details provided in the enumeration forms, the entries for these voters were identified either in the list of logical discrepancies or as unmapped in the last SIR,” said an official, adding, “Consequently, according to the standard operating procedures of Election Commission of India, notices were issued to the electors as part of the verification process.

The cases were then examined individually. In most cases, election officials contacted the voters, collected the required details and documents and completed the verification.”The list of voters in Delhi who have been identified for serving of SIR notices includes 33 lakh people across its 70 assembly constituencies. The SIR notices are issued by election officials and delivered physically to the voters by booth-level officers (BLOs).

“The dispatch of the notices began from Aug 31; most of the voters have received the notices,” said an official.The Delhi poll panel must complete the disposal of all the notices by Oct 29 because the publication of the final SIR rolls is scheduled for Nov 4. The responses to the notices can be submitted online as well as offline by visiting assistant electoral registration officers (AEROs), whose details and time of visits are mentioned in the SIR notices.The office of Delhi’s chief electoral officer has clarified that receiving an SIR notice by itself does not mean that a voter’s name will be deleted from the rolls. Rather, it provides an opportunity for the elector to submit the required information and documents before a decision is taken on the entry.

...Elsewhere, it’s lessons and livelihoods versus vote

Electoral forms, identity cards and voter records have all but edged out textbooks and worksheets at a Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) school in Tughlaqabad, with its teachers having to split their time between taking lessons and conducting the ongoing SIR verification exercise.As locals queued up inside classrooms of Nigam Pratibha Vidyalaya in Harkesh Nagar Thursday afternoon to get errors in their poll records corrected, TOI saw students continue with their studies even as teachers appeared stressed while juggling both responsibilities.Two officials were seen handling the locals and their forms in Room No. 3, which appeared to have been turned into a makeshift verification sp­a­ce.

Books and other stationery items were stacked inside, while a small setup for brew­i­ng tea was visible in one corner.Locals arriving at the room had largely the same set of complaints — spelling mistakes in names, surnames not matching those in their documents, differences in age or date of birth and incorrect family details in the electoral records. Several said what appeared to be minor dis­cr­ep­ancies were making them visit different centres or return multiple times to this one.Many of them, including several daily-wage earners, said repeated trips to camps and electoral offices were affecting their livelihoods and costing them their daily earnings.Murli Choudhary, 41, a vegetable seller, said he had been visiting one centre after another for the past three days to get a simple spelling correction in his name done. “I have two children and I need to earn every day. I can manage if I lose out on a day’s work, but I cannot afford to lose three days,” he said, adding the frustration had reached a point that he would rather have his name removed from the electoral rolls than keep making repeated trips to these centres.Savitri Devi, a resident of Okhla Phase-1, said she had already visited a centre in Lajpat Nagar four times over a discrepancy in her age and was again trying her luck in this one.Several others echoed similar concerns, saying anomalies involving names, spellings, ages and missing family members from the 2002 electoral rolls were forcing them to make two or three rounds of different centres. For them, each additional visit came at a direct cost.Some, like Choudhary, said they were so frustrated that they were willing to give up their voting rights rather than repeatedly compromise their work to get the discrepancies corrected.The residents are not the only ones to feel the heat. Teachers at the school said they were struggling to balance two demanding responsibilities. Their day begins at 6am, followed by regular school work and classes, after which they are expected to cater to locals visiting the school for SIR-related verification.“How can we manage both? If there is pressure from both ends, we cannot do justice to either,” a teacher said, on condition of anonymity, adding that they had been doing the additional work for around three months. Another teacher said he was feeling the pressure of juggling SIR-related work and daily duties towards students.Yet some other teachers, struggling to manage both responsibilities, have brought the electoral verification work into their classrooms.

In one such classroom, TOI saw some students studying and others playing even as their teacher attended to the locals, checking their documents and clearing their doubts related to electoral records.An official from South East district election office said that BLOs and election officials in Tughlaqabad AC are helping out voters, and issues of many of them are being resolved every day. “If voters have any further grievance, we will sort them out,” the official added.