Hyderabad: A purported audio recording of a Booth-Level Officer (BLO) refusing to carry out the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) mapping exercise of voter rolls in Hyderabad has gone viral on social media, with the person on the call citing unpaid remuneration as the reason for his reluctance.
In the recording, the man claims that several BLOs have stopped performing the mapping duty over delays in payment. The clip is unverified, and it remains unclear whether the caller is indeed a BLO. Officials have not responded to the recording.
Though the call recording is unverified and it is not clear whether the person who is making claims is a BLO, officials are yet to respond to the viral recording.
Untrained BLOs giving wrong guidance
The viral clip comes amid mounting concerns about the conduct of the pre-SIR mapping exercise in Hyderabad.
In a separate video that circulated recently, a BLO assigned to polling station number 101 of Chandrayangutta Assembly constituency admitted to having no knowledge of the exercise he was tasked with carrying out, turning out to be a sanitation worker.
Women mapped with wrong relatives
Syed Mushtaq Ahmed, the personal assistant to All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) MP Asaduddin Owaisi, flagged a particularly serious error at multiple awareness camps.
He said some BLOs were mapping married women with their fathers-in-law, a combination explicitly not permitted under ECI guidelines.
BLOs unreachable, WhatsApp used as substitute
Residents have also raised concerns about BLOs being unreachable. Many do not respond to calls and have been treating a WhatsApp message from a voter as the completion of mapping, leaving residents with no means to verify whether the process was carried out correctly or at all.
What the rules say
The ECI has specified six permissible relations for the mapping exercise – father, mother, maternal grandfather, maternal grandmother, paternal grandfather and paternal grandmother.
Mapping is a pre-SIR exercise currently underway in Hyderabad and other districts of Telangana. Voters whose names appear in the 2002 SIR list can map themselves. Those whose names do not appear can map with an eligible relative.
