‘Cockatoo’ turns Kokapet as EC cleans up Telangana electoral rolls ahead of SIR

HYDERABAD: The Election Commission has carried out extensive revisions of the 2002 electoral rolls, to be used for the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in May. The errors were fixed a day after TOI published a report about absurd polling station names creeping into the rolls making it difficult for voters to track their names.

TOI's report on March 3 had shown how nonsensical words and phrases like ‘For Pakistan', ‘Slingshot', ‘Cockatoo', ‘Cashew Lizard', ‘Big Goot', and ‘Goat's Nest', had been used in the rolls to represent polling stations.

After the revisions, ‘The Knee' and ‘Cockatoo' were revised to Mokila and Kokapet in Chevella constituency – 2 key upcoming residential hubs on Hyderabad's periphery.




Similarly, ‘A small salon' was corrected to Chinna Mangalaram, ‘Slingshot' to Kammeta, and ‘Find the pumpkin' to Gummadi Doddi. "The errors happened because of loose translation from Telugu to English," said C Sudharshan Reddy, chief electoral officer (CEO )of Telangana.

Some of the other polling station names, which were corrected, include ‘Lazy' to Sommidi, ‘For Pakistan' to Pak Patla, ‘Among the monkeys' to Kothulanaduma, and ‘Johncompete' to Jankampet.

"We had corrected these names in our list about three months back. The same might not have reflected on the website. We think these errors might have crept in while uploading the data, as the software used seems to have translated Telugu words into English," said an electoral registration officer .

Activists, meanwhile, raised concerns over such negligence and added that the issue cannot be ignored on the assumption that it was a translation error.

"Action should be initiated against those responsible, as there is no way people could have identified their polling stations using these names. Had these absurdities not been detected, it could have resulted in names of lakhs of voters being deleted from the rolls" said Syed Jalaluddin Zafar, an activist and president of Youth Welfare Telangana, an NGO.