Swaraat / Padmanabhan N S
SIR – Special Intensive Revision or Regression? It is a well-known fact that the world population is dynamic. Dynamic in the sense that dynamism due to age, location existence and so on. Due to these reasons it is imperative that the Election Commission of India revises the electoral rolls on a regular basis, lest the dead rise from the graves once in five years to cast their votes or perhaps citizens of other countries become patriotic voters of our nation.
Therefore, we should in fact protest objectively on the delay or procrastination on this process. However, the ground reality is awful. The ground staff are not fully trained; the portal works at its whims and fancies. The database conveniently misses a lot of old voter ID comfortably substituting with a hyphen.
At the outset the Booth Level Officer (BLO) is ill equipped to handle so many voters due to lack of complete understanding, non-comprehension of the purpose of the mission, lack of software knowledge, and the woes go on and on.With the elections due in May 2026 in Tamilagam, the Election Commission has in earnest commenced the exercise in November 2025 beginning, which is a bit too late in our opinion.
We believe, that by this time the forms should have been distributed filled up and sorted out. However, the process of distribution of the forms has just begun. The greatest irony is , while the form says Adhar number is optional, it makes it mandatory for EPIC download or online submission of Form 8 or other relevant forms.
Furthermore, many voters are confused about filling sections ‘2’ and ‘3’ with the instructions being unclear at best even if given in Tamil or an accompanying video is shared by the BLOs. The data base cannot retrieve old data from new voter ID though the option is given. It stares at us like a beast not understanding a word of syllable and spews out ‘No Records Found’ and ‘Service Not Available’ more than often.
The search for a needle in a haystack appears to be far easier than filling the SIR forms. The search option by Electoral roll is most painstaking and ultimately yields no results when trying to do the process online. It is disappointing that the Election Commission is under prepared for this exercise as this is not the first time and that have just completed in Bihar. It’s a classic case of putting the cart before the horse—an avoidable misstep.