MUMBAI: More than a week after the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) announcement of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maharashtra, political parties have shown a mixed response in appointing Booth Level Agents (BLAs). According to the Maharashtra Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO) office, the state has 1,00,253 polling booths, but most parties have appointed far fewer BLAs. The BJP leads with 52,215 BLAs, followed by the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena (17,800), Congress (17,421), Sharad Pawar-led NCP (4468) and Shiv Sena (UBT) (10,140). The ECI’s state unit will begin the voter list revision exercise from June 30.
The BLAs are appointed by recognised political parties for each polling booth and work in coordination with Booth Level Officers (BLOs), who are the representative of the ECI at ground zero. Usually local party workers, BLAs help identify deceased, shifted, or duplicate voters to maintain an accurate and clean electoral roll.
Considering the chaos in states of West Bengal and Bihar on the SIR of electoral roll ahead of the respective Assembly elections, the Maharashtra CEO office has been continuously requesting all political parties to appoint BLAs who can assist the BLOs for reaching out to the voters. “We have written multiple letters requesting all the political parties to appoint BLAs for the SIR. Apart from us, we have also instructed all the district collectors to push for the appointment of BLAs at all polling booths in their respective districts,” said a senior official from the state branch of ECI.
He also said that the BLAs will help BLOs to reach out to the voters at local level for the SIR as they know about the voters whether he is alive, shifted or dead. “After the draft publication of the electoral roll for the SIR at each polling booth, the BLOs will give a list of deleted voters to the BLAs for his confirmation. While giving the proposed deletion list of the voters, a photo of handing over the list to the BLAs by the BLOs will be taken, so that the political parties would subsequently not create any problem as they had done in Bihar and West Bengal,” the senior official said. If the BLAs raise their objections and provide relevant documents of the voters who are identified for deletion, his name will be added to the voter list.
Officials said that the Nationalist Congress Party led by Sunetra Pawar has appointed 6,472 BLAs across the state, while the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena led by Raj Thackeray has appointed 3,848 BLAs, followed by the Bahujan Samaj Party (193) and the Aam Aadmi Party (57).
Meanwhile, Maharashtra CEO S Chockalingam informed that the mapping of electoral rolls in Maharashtra has reached 72.04 percent with 7 crore electors mapped out of 9,86,44,413 electors. “Our BLOs will visit each home to check whether mapping is done or not from June 30 to July 29,” he said.
When asked whether more time will be sought from the ECI as demanded by political parties, Mr. Chockaligam said that if there is any kind of delay in the completion of the SIR due to any reason, they would seek additional time from the ECI.
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