Mangaluru: The Election Commission’s special intensive revision process has been contentious for several reasons, among which is the extraordinary pressure it has put on Block Level Officers or BLOs who are expected to do the preliminary bulk of ground work in addition to their government jobs. Under severe pressure and with impending deadlines, many BLOs have resorted to measures that, in turn, invite serious concerns on privacy rights. §A few weeks ago, Harshita Kale, a Pune-based journalist, was unexpectedly added to a WhatsApp group. It had no description, no familiar names, but more than a hundred members. Assuming it was spam, she had immediately exited.Within minutes, her phone began ringing. It was the group’s administrator, who called her repeatedly. When she didn’t answer, she was added back.Only later did Kale realise that the group’s administrator was the BLO for the constituency where she is registered to vote and the WhatsApp group had been created as part of the ongoing SIR of the electoral rolls.“Until then, I was frankly unaware that the SIR process was underway in Maharashtra,” she says. Soon after, what alarmed Kale, she says, was how scores of people voluntarily uploaded personal documents – identity proofs, address proofs and other sensitive records – into a group in which the documents would be visible to every member.The BLO, who The Wire spoke to, said they were out of choices. “I have over 1,300 voters to locate in a very short period [one month]. Through the group, I was able to map more than 500 of them virtually. It is an unbelievably difficult job,” they said. The Wire is withholding the identity of the BLO on request. For voters, however, this raised serious privacy concerns. A common WhatsApp group meant that personal documents were accessible to everyone in it.The BLO said that the information was never left online for long. “I was only taking the documents and that took a few minutes. Anyone in the group will tell you that the information stayed there for less than 10 minutes,” they said. The BLO, also a teacher at a government school, said their area has several demolished houses and that they decided to use their time efficiently to be able to find those who have either lost their house in the city demolition drive or migrated to nearby areas. Screengrabs showing the WhatsApp group. All identifying details have been redacted.Kale’s experience, and this particular BLO’s approach, are not isolated.Many BLOs in various parts of Pune and Mumbai have resorted to common sharing platforms to collect vital information, essential for the mapping and enumeration process under SIR. In Mumbai’s Bandra constituency, when a BLO asked for voters’ details on a WhatsApp group, a few voters refused to share them. “I soon got a call from the BLO explaining how it was for my own good. The BLOs also subtly tried telling me that if we didn’t cooperate, there are chances that we will be dropped from the SIR process,” one of the voters from the region told The Wire. A senior journalist in New Delhi, Pankaj Pachauri, claimed on X that BLOs have been told by the ECI “verbally” to create WhatsApp groups to communicate with their respective area voters. This, the BLOs that The Wire spoke to, denied. “No such directions were given to us,” said a BLO in Kalyan West constituency in Maharashtra.The BLOs whom The Wire spoke to said that this was just a way they had devised to complete the task of collating details of several hundred people within time. The Wire has reached out to the Election Commission and the State Election Commissioner for clarity on this and the question of punishing deadlines on BLOs. This report will be updated if there is a response.‘The frenzy this process has caused’Giving such an important process such little time, is “unreasonable”, says Congress leader and president of Nagpur City District Congress Committee, Praful Gudadhe Patil. He says the process has caused unnecessary anxiety in both the BLOs and the general public. Gudadhe Patil, who has been actively working on ground to ensure the process is completed properly in Nagpur says, “There is no reason why the ECI has given just a month to the BLOs to finish their door-to-door visits. The frenzy this process has caused on the ground is unimaginable.”Although the SIR exercise has only recently begun in states including Maharashtra, similar drives in states such as Assam, Bihar and West Bengal have already shown how demanding the process had been for BLOs. BLOs’ experiences in other states have revealed the scale of the pressures built into the job. Many were assigned hundreds to well over a thousand electors each and were expected to complete door-to-door verification within compressed deadlines. They were mostly schoolteachers, anganwadi workers or other government employees, who had a full-time job and also assigned responsibilities to take care of at their primary work place. The Wire’s reporters extensively reported on the plights of the BLOs who had to travel long distances, revisit locked homes multiple times, field anxious or angry questions from voters and work late into the evening and on holidays to meet targets. Several BLOs have also died in the process. Tracking down voters within tight deadlines often requires tremendous effort and if the BLOs are coming up with their own mechanisms to complete the task, it is clear that they are not to be blamed but the Election Commission and its policies that burden them with a humongous task to be finished within a short span. This report does not intend to pick on a particular BLO but to highlight the flawed nature of the exercise.