“We are not computers or robots that we will do BLO work after teaching hours too,” says Rajat*, a higher secondary teacher in Ambedkar Nagar, South Delhi.

Rajat began work as a Booth Level Officer for the Special Intensive Revision of Delhi’s electoral rolls on June 30. His day now starts at 6 am and ends at midnight, sometimes 1 am – roughly 11 hours of it spent between classrooms and door-to-door enumeration. He is responsible for about 1,150 voters. Most, he says, either don’t know how to fill the enumeration form or don’t have the documents it asks for. He fields nearly a hundred calls a day, several of them from the same person. By the time he reaches school the next morning, he says, he has little capacity to teach.

Across Delhi, thousands of government school teachers have been pulled into the SIR as BLOs. Ambedkar Nagar, a single assembly constituency in South Delhi, shows what that has meant on the ground. Newslaundry spoke to 10 BLOs in the constituency, most of whom described sustained physical and mental exhaustion. They say they are working 11-hour days without compensation, sometimes despite being sick, even as their schools are running short-staffed. 

On July 28, the Delhi High Court asked the Election Commission of India to “humanise their condition”. But BLOs claim nobody is listening. 

‘There is nobody to listen to the teachers’

“I fell ill for two days, now I’m walking the lanes on medication,” says Satish*, another teacher and BLO in Ambedkar Nagar. Unlike Rajat, he has not been able to teach at all since the SIR began. “If I put in six hours of duty at school, how will I do the SIR work?” he asks. The two days he lost to illness have to be made up against a target of over 900 forms.

Preeti*, a teacher and BLO in Jawahar Nagar, says she has lost three kilos in a month. She too averages more than 11 hours a day – school runs till 1 pm, the commute home takes another hour, and by 4 pm she is out again. “I have a skin condition that got aggravated due to field visits in the sun and I have an eye........

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