Political workers fan out to help Mumbai SIR-vive mapping

MUMBAI: There is no election on the horizon. No rallies. No slogans blaring from autorickshaws. Yet across the city, political party workers are moving through narrow lanes, climbing staircases in ageing housing societies and knocking on doors with unusual urgency, trying to ensure that voters do not disappear from electoral rolls.

At a school in Nagpada, booth level officers (BLOs) sit behind plastic tables stacked with forms and photocopies. Beside them hovers 46-yearold Shaikh Nasir Hussain, a Congress ward general secretary who has become an unofficial navigator for officials rushing to complete the preparatory exercise for Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

Hussain does not wait for voters to arrive. He tracks them down himself. Before officials reach an area, he has often already scouted the locality, identified buildings where camps can be held, informed residents and persuaded families to gather documents.

“They know the locality, old lists and families well,” says a BLO, referring to foot soldiers like Hussain. “When people get confused about their records or their parents’ details, these workers guide them. They help find correct centres, retrieve details online and identify where a person or family was listed earlier.”

Across Mumbai, this collaboration is quietly taking shape as the city prepares for a process that has erased crores of names elsewhere in India. Election Commission will conduct the full revision for Maharashtra’s 98.6 million voters between June 30 and July 29.

For BLOs, the pre-SIR mapping scale is daunting. Most are BMC teachers or govt employees handling election work in addition to regular duties. Each one is responsible for verifying nearly 1,000 voters. “Party workers have been amajor support,” says another BLO.

“They help us with voters’ records, which reduces nearly 50% of our workload.” But the official is careful to draw a line. “We don’t rely solely on their information. Detail is cross-verified, and mapping is done only after records appear in official database.”

The result of this collaboration is a hybrid system: official verification reinforced by neighbourhood memory.

In Mulund West’s Saptrishi Complex, a family sat before a BLO trying to reconstruct decades of movement: Dombivli until 1998, Coimbatore for nearly 10 years, then Mumbai again after 2008. Asked where they appeared on the 2002 rolls, they had no answer.

The breakthrough came not from govt records, but from a local party worker, BJP’s Sunil Desai. After speaking with the family for nearly half an hour, he traced their earlier address in Dombivli and located their names on an old voter list there.

In nearby Riddhi Siddhi Society, party workers helped BLOs identify which residents had died, moved abroad, married and shifted homes, and which flats were occupied by tenants. In Deonar, resident Siddhesh Tijare says political party workers helped his family trace older records after years spent overseas.

The involvement of political parties is hardly accidental. With no immediate election to mobilise around, the exercise has become an opportunity to strengthen grassroots networks. Last month, BMC commissioner Ashwini Bhide appealed to political parties and elected representatives toassist with the process. The response has been enthusiastic, and competitive.

In Nagpada, Congress workers set up a help desk even before BLOs arrived, with residents already pre-sorted by ward, documents in hand. Congress MLA Amin Patel says voters displaced by redevelopment are among the most vulnerable. In several neighbourhoods, buildings that existed in 2002 have been demolished and rebuilt, making older records difficult to trace.

BJP state vice-president Keshav Upadhye says party workers have been instructed to conduct awareness drives, especially among voters added after 2002. In Mulund, BJP MLA Mihir Kotecha says teams are reaching out to nearly 1,800 housing societies.

Shiv Sena (UBT)’s Haroon Khan has meanwhile been organising SIR awareness sessions in western suburbs.

Across party lines, the calculation is simple: voters remember who helped them. For officials conducting the exercise, intermediaries are increasingly indispensable.

Residents, however, have responded unevenly. “People say they are busy,” says BLO Rekha Mehta. “Some don’t mind if their name is deleted.”

Before the formal SIR begins on June 30, the preparatory phase has already made one thing plain: in a megacity of nearly 1 crore voters, the machinery of democracy does not run on official infrastructure alone. Some mornings, it runs on Hussain’s scooter, through the lanes of Nagpada before BLOs have had their tea.

(With inputs from Chittaranjan Tembhekar)