Parveen Begum puts her pen down and drops her writing pad onto the table in front of her. “Please give me a couple of minutes, my hand hurts,” she tells the sympathetic couple seated across from her. The table at the Anganwadi centre in Hyderabad’s Baggikhana slum is buried under a stack of enumeration forms.

Parveen points to them with a tired smile.

“I must have filled around 40 forms today. Yesterday it was 57.”

For the past three weeks, this has become routine. An Accredited Social Health Activist, (ASHA) since 2018, Parveen has spent the last three months working as a Booth Level Officer (BLO) for the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

Forms and stationery at a Booth Level Officer's table in Hyderabad

Before the enumeration began, she spent nearly two months assisting the pre-SIR mapping exercise in Telangana, matching existing voters with the 2002 electoral rolls to verify records. As the exercise enters its final stretch, the workload for Booth Level Officers (BLOs) has intensified.

TNM spoke to a few BLOs in Telangana and Karnataka involved in the current phase of the SIR, which involves distributing, collecting and verifying enumeration forms. This phase was scheduled to conclude on July 24 in Telangana and July 29 in Karnataka. Many BLOs said the timelines were unrealistic given the volume of work, and had called for an extension to complete the exercise. The ECI on July 15 revised the schedule and extended the house visit deadlines.

'Distributing forms was only half the work'

Assigned to a polling station in Hyderabad’s Khairtabad Assembly constituency, Parveen is responsible for around 1,200 registered voters and their enumeration. She has already distributed forms to almost every household in her area, with only about 80 to 100 left.

“But that was only half the work,” she says.

“With SIR ending in 10 days, I have to fill out many forms because people are unable to do it themselves. I know this community well, so identifying people........

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