India’s new suicide crisis: Poll workers take lives amid voter recount rush

At least 33 poll officials have died since launch of criticised revision of electoral rolls, many of them by suicide.

Lucknow, India – Harshit Verma believes his 50-year-old father, Vijay Kumar Verma, died because he was handling an “inhuman task”.

Vijay, a contractual government teacher in Lucknow, the capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh state, was hired as a booth-level officer (BLO) to conduct a revision of the voter list in his constituency, as part of an enormous electoral exercise involving millions of BLOs across the world’s most populous country.

The exercise, called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), was launched by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on November 4, across 12 states and federally governed territories, to update the electoral rolls by adding eligible voters through house-to-house enumeration and removing ineligible people. The exercise will be repeated in the remaining states in phases.

According to a handbook for BLOs on the ECI’s website, their responsibilities range from doing house visits to identifying existing and dead voters, collecting their photos and other relevant documents, and uploading them on a designated portal. The BLOs, who are mostly government teachers or junior officials, have complained of their immense work pressure. A single mistake means the entire process of filling out the forms and uploading them has to be done again.

A report last week by the Spect Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank, said at least 33 BLOs have died across India since November 4, at least nine of whom took their own lives and left desperate accounts of their work pressure in their suicide notes.