“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 operation pending. There is nobody to listen to the teachers,” she said.

Rakesh Kumar*, a BLO in Khanpur, was bitten by a dog while on field duty. He informed his Electoral Registration Officer and was taken to Safdarjung Hospital. He is back on the ground now, working through a backlog and worrying about his health.

“Keeping any human being like this for a month is both against human rights and labour law,” said Dipankar*. His only reliable window without calls from voters, he says, runs from 10.30 pm to 7 am.

Confusion about forms

Every BLO Newslaundry spoke to in Ambedkar Nagar said the voters in their booths had little idea about the SIR, which is why the forms keep coming back wrong.

The 2002 mapping requirement is the sharpest edge of it. “The ECI lets married women register their voter ID under their husband’s name, but when it comes to SIR’s progeny mapping, that husband’s name entry is irrelevant,” says Dipankar. It’s largely because many of these women voters were neither married nor on the list in 2002, he explains. “Women are instead required to trace and document their parents’ or grandparents’ electoral history, a paper trail many can’t produce.” Five of the ten BLOs raised the same problem, specifically for women who married into Delhi from outside.

Satish says older voters in his booth often have no photographs and are unsure of their own dates of birth. Like most BLOs, he ends up filling forms himself or sitting with voters while they do, and then uploading each one digitally. Rakesh claims the form is complex enough that he has returned to the same house seven or eight times to collect it.

“One person keeps calling six to seven times to clarify doubts regarding the forms. It is not their fault, but taking such calls continuously even during school hours drives me crazy,” says Rajat.

None of the BLOs disputed that the revision is part of their constitutional duty. But they said the time granted – nearly a month – is not enough for an exercise this complicated, and that there is no compensation for the additional work.

Threat of action

Ambedkar Nagar started the SIR with 46 teaching staff on BLO duty. By mid-July, that number had more than tripled. An order issued by the constituency’s ERO on July 14 requisitioned 149 teachers from roughly 17 government schools, redesignating all of them as Booth Level Volunteers. They were given till July 29, required to be available on all working days and, if needed, on holidays, with no leave granted without the ERO’s prior approval.

The order also invoked Section 32 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 – three months to two years’ imprisonment for negligence, unauthorised absence, refusal to perform election duty, or delay – against people it called volunteers.

“It is written in such a way that everyone gets scared, and it is out of that fear alone that no one is able to raise their voice,” says Rajat.

Several districts in Delhi remain short of the 100 percent digitisation target, and the enumeration deadline has since been pushed from July 29 to August 8. On July 8, Anand Kumar Saroha, a 45-year-old maths teacher at a Sarvodaya Vidyalaya and a BLO supervisor, allegedly died by suicide. His family says his requests for medical leave from SIR duty had been repeatedly rejected.

The children left behind

On July 21, advocates Rajesh Kumar Gogna and Ashok Agarwal filed a public interest litigation in the Delhi High Court, naming the Ambedkar Nagar order among the practices they want reined in. The petition mentioned the impact on teaching and schoolchildren.

The petition cited a July 3 Times of India report that the entire regular teaching staff of a government school in Bhalswa – about 20 teachers for roughly 1,200 students – had been put on BLO duty, leaving 15 guest teachers to run 22 classes. It also carried a July 14 joint letter from the Vice-Principals’ and Principals’ Association warning that with full staffs withdrawn, schools cannot maintain basic child safety SOPs, which assume a level of staff presence that no longer exists.

Not one teacher from a private unaided school in Delhi has been requisitioned, the lawyers say; the burden falls entirely on government, municipal and government-aided schools that serve poor and lower middle-class families, while private schooling runs uninterrupted. They have asked the court to cap deployment at 10 percent of a school’s regular teaching staff at any time, with the rest scheduled outside school hours.

At the July 28 hearing, the Chief Justice pushed back on the ECI, noting that asking a teacher to work 11-hour days when they have children and families of their own means the Commission must “humanise their condition”. The bench was clear that it was not touching the ECI’s constitutional power to requisition teachers but insisting that the power stop short of an “unbearable burden”.

In its affidavit, the ECI maintained that deployment was confined to non-teaching hours, and that only 104 of the 149 teachers requisitioned in Ambedkar Nagar actually joined – about 14 percent of the schools’ combined teaching strength. It also pointed to a July 23 circular from the Delhi CEO’s office reissuing that instruction, two days after the PIL was filed. 

But the petitioners claimed that the circular existed because the Directorate of Education had flagged teachers missing from classrooms for too long across Delhi’s 13 districts, and the lawyers note that roughly 10,000 teachers were returned to schools only after the petition forced the issue.

The teachers share the worry. “It’s the children who are suffering. Tell me, what are we supposed to do?” says Satish.

“I am specifically worried about my students who are in class 10. They have their board exams, but earlier I was posted for census duty and now SIR. They are my biggest worry,” says Rakesh.

Newslaundry reached out to ERO Poonam Prakash for comment over the phone and on email. This report will be updated if a response is received.

Names of BLOs have been changed to protect their identity.

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