Hyderabad: Mohammed Nargis has spent most of her adult life fending for herself. Widowed soon after her children were born, she raised them alone, working as a butcher, a trade tied to her Katika caste, before moving to work in a hotel. Now in her seventies, she lives by herself in a rented room in Sri Ram Nagar Colony, Uppal, on a state pension of Rs 2,000 a month, out of which she pays Rs 2,500 in rent.
These days, she has a fresh worry. She lost her Voter ID two years ago, and the state’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has left her racing to replace it before her name can be struck off the list altogether.
‘They keep shooing us away’
On Monday, July 13, Nargis went to the Malkajgiri Municipal Corporation office to ask for a new voter ID card. She was turned away, with officials telling her that the process for issuing new cards in her locality would only begin next month.
Unconvinced, she kept repeating to Siasat.com, “Woh humko hakaal dere (they keep shooing me away).”
At the special help desk set up to assist voters with the SIR process, an assistant told her, politely, that there was no way to check whether her name was on the voters’ list unless she had a mobile phone linked to her voter ID. Nargis doesn’t own one, but her daughter does.
She left the office still hoping the problem might get sorted out some other day. “The government is giving me pension. So I want to show my gratitude by voting,” she told Siasat.com.
Nargis is one of what are probably tens of thousands of senior citizens across Telangana unfamiliar with the technicalities of the SIR process and struggling to hold on to their right to vote. Even those who understand the system well are finding it an uphill task.
A retired headmaster’s runaround
Vinjamuri Subramanya Prasad, also in his seventies, was at the same corporation office on Monday, wrestling with a different problem. His family lives in Uppal, where his own vote and his son’s are registered. But his wife’s and daughter’s votes had somehow been shifted to Neredmet, in the neighbouring Malkajgiri constituency.
A retired headmaster, Prasad has spent the past few days shuttling between Uppal and Neredmet with two Form 8s in hand, trying to get the two votes transferred back. “We did this voter enrollment process as government employees, but those who joined service after 2000s don’t know the process. They have messed up everything. Even the media doesn’t show that,” he told Siasat.com.
Officials eventually admitted the transfer may have been a manual error and assured him the Form 8s would be processed within a month or two, small comfort for a man who has already spent hundreds of rupees travelling between constituencies to fix an error that wasn’t his making.
Forms undelivered, officers unreachable
Many voters have not been served their enumeration forms at all. In several such cases, Booth Level Officers (BLO) have simply marked the voter as having “vacated” or “left” the address – a catch-all category for anyone who has shifted residence. Not knowing whom else to turn to, these voters have been flooding the corporation’s help desk, where an assistant patiently hears them out and points them towards the BLOs concerned.
That, however, is often just the start of another ordeal. Some BLOs are responsive, others don’t answer calls, or are out of network coverage altogether. Even when a BLO does agree to meet a voter to hand over an enumeration form, that officer’s area is typically already swamped with others facing the same problem.
“The problem is that the enumeration forms have already been dispatched to the BLOs. Why shouldn’t they issue the enumeration forms here itself to any voter who wants to get enumerated,” one voter asked, echoing the frustration of many in the queue.
With just 11 days left before the enumeration process concludes on July 24, voters have been flocking to the SIR help desk in growing numbers to prevent their names from being struck off the rolls.
Voters whose names have already been deleted are also showing up at the help desk. They are being told that once the enumeration process ends and the draft list is published, expected by the end of July, a fresh window for voter enrolment will open in August, when they can attempt to reclaim their vote, provided their claim is found genuine.
Many of those affected have begun comparing the SIR exercise to demonetisation, a sweeping new process where, they say, the burden of proving one’s innocence has fallen entirely on ordinary citizens.
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