"I want to live… but I cannot bear this inhuman workload."

The line should never have been written.

These were the dying words of Rinku Tarafdar—a Booth Level Officer in her early fifties—one of many tasked with completing the SIR exercise in West Bengal.

When she was found hanging on November 22, her suicide note stressed that she had completed "ninety-five per cent" of the work, but the digital part of it was beyond her.

The note had an even more poignant observation.

"I am happy in my life," Rinku reportedly wrote. "There are no problems. But for such a modest job, they are forcing me to end my life."

The contractual teacher was among at least 14 BLOs who died in three weeks across the nation. That grim number translates to one death in less than two days.

Some of these BLOs died from exhaustion that their relatives said triggered cardiac arrests, some from strokes, and some—like Rinku—from despair and depression that pushed them over the edge.

In all the deaths, the same accusation has surfaced again and again: the SIR exercise thrust upon them by the Election Commission was to blame.

In total, West Bengal has lost four BLOs—three of them women. Two died by suicide. One died due to a stroke and another due to cardiac arrest.

Each death leaves behind a family still struggling to understand why their loved one had to undergo such a fate.

One knew nothing about online, another couldn't read Bengali

Rinku was a part-time teacher. She earned very little. The enumeration duties—especially the online part—terrified her.

"I do not know anything about online," she wrote.

She underlined that she had informed her supervisor and also the BDO's office about this. But that proved to be of little help to her.

Her husband, Ashish Tarafdar, remembers her utter panic. "She was scared she would be blamed. She had finished almost everything, except the uploading of forms," he told reporters.

Rinku wasn't the only one whose work left her gasping daily and finally crushed her utterly.

Three days before Rinku died, 48-year-old Shanti Muni Ekka, another BLO, was found hangin outside her house.

Her family alleges that she was forced to take this step after the BDO repeatedly rejected her request to relieve her of election duties.

"When she went to resign, the BDO said your name is here, so it cannot be removed. You have to work," Shanti's husband, Suku Ekka, was reported as saying.

"She did not know how to read or write Bengali, yet she had to work with the SIR forms in Bengali," he added.

Shanti's son, D'Souza Ekka, spoke of how Shanti's booth mostly covered the tea garden workers.

"She had to visit the houses at night because in the morning no one is there. It is very tough to go door-to-door at night in the tea garden areas," he was quoted as recounting.

"The SIR work left my mother devastated," he emphasised.

Suku Ekka has now filed an FIR against the Election Commission of India, alleging that Shanti took the drastic step due to extreme work pressure during SIR duty.

Two more who allegedly succumbed to the SIR overload

Before them, 50-year-old Namita Hansda died of a brain stroke on November 9.

Her husband blamed it on the stress brought on by the SIR workload.

"Every day, she was being told to distribute more enumeration forms. She worked late into the night under immense pressure," he was quoted as saying.

The latest death was reported from Khargram in Murshidabad district when 56-year-old Zakir Hossain, a school teacher, died of cardiac arrest.

SIR, is this fair at all?

But why did SIR induce so much stress and distress?

On paper, a BLO's tasks seem well-structured: three visits to every house, distribute the forms, collect them, identify dead voters, trace duplicates, digitise forms and upload them.

In reality, it is severely taxing. BLOs in West Bengal have to cover 80,681 booths, with 800 to 1,200 voters each.

The work begins at 7am for the BLOs saddled with covering larger booths. And it ends—if it ends at all—by around 10pm.

"Sometimes even after going to a house thrice, people won't be there to collect the forms. And then we find that some of those who collected the form aren't available for days when we go in the hope of collecting the filled-out forms. Then there are those who have not filled out anything on the form for a week straight. What can we do there?" a BLO said, listing out some of the challenges he encountered.

Another BLO from South Kolkata gave a similar account, even though his poll booth covers only 542 voters.

"My SIR work goes on till as late as 11 pm," he said. He recounted how some voters turned up at his door as late as midnight, either to clarify doubts or to submit forms.

"How do you define the work hours for SIR? Is it only the time I am physically outdoors. What about the mental stress I face when I am indoors?" the BLO, who is a teacher, went on to ask.

"Exams are going on in my school, and I have to correct papers and upload them. I hardly have time to breathe," he added.

Many teachers, who work as BLOs, say they have not been relieved from their regular work. This despite the BLO's Handbook 2011 stressing that a BLO has to be relieved from their office work while on revision duty.

A former spokesperson of the Bengal BJP said the state government has not relieved BLOs from their regular work. "That leads to increased workload. Mamata government should be blamed for this, not the election commission," he said.

When you approach schools whose teachers are out on BLO duty, you hear another side of the story.

"Exams are coming up, and we are down to seven teachers. We had only 12 teachers, but five have been sent on BLO work," said a headmistress from a state-government school in Khardah. "How am I supposed to run the school?"

Moody servers and then there's what is lost in translation

The Election Commission's portal can be very moody, many BLOs say.

On some days it accepted uploads only at 11pm or at dawn.

Adding to this were the instances of how scanned documents were misread. "For example, Bengali and English numbers can get confusing for the portal," a BLO said.

Beyond these were the occasions when the portal froze. In fact, one of the BLOs agreed to speak "only because the server is now down.”

Another recalled discovering—halfway through the drive—that he had been doing an entire process wrong because the training was insufficient.

BLOs in Barrackpore protested the sudden imposition of online duties. One of them said that they knew the protest wouldn’t yield anything but had protested anyway. All of them later returned to work.

Some BLOs say the Election Commission addressed a few of the complaints. They employed more assistant BLOs in Kolkata to speed up the digitisation work.

"They also made the server a little faster. Initially, a scanned form was taking 15 minutes to upload. After the fix, it took a lot less time," said a BLO from South Kolkata. "They also introduced an edit button after multiple requests. It helped us correct our mistakes."

'SIM'ple solution that was avoided

Many BLOs were miffed by the fact that the Election Commission made their numbers public. The Commission said the move was meant to help voters.

But the already overworked BLOs said it left them vulnerable to calls even at midnight.

A BLO in Jadavpur received 140 calls in a day. Only half of them were voter enquiries, while the rest were prank calls, according to a media report.

Another BLO worried about the safety of his family.

"If someone’s name is missing, the locals will come for me. I have a wife and a daughter," he said.

"I at least am a man. What about the women whose numbers have been given out openly? They should have given us official SIM cards," he stressed.

Caught in the middle

Both the leading parties, the ruling Trinamool Congress and the opposition BJP, agreed that the BLOs were under siege. But their reasons for why this happened diverged.

Asoke Dutta, a block president of the TMC in South Kolkata, said the EC had imposed impossible deadlines and that a month was too short a time to complete the SIR process.

"There are so many houses, and in urban areas, there are flats that often lack elevators, making the work both physically and mentally draining for the BLOs," he said.

Dutta also alleged that a BLO in his area informed him that the Election Commission had sought the collection of the completed enumeration forms by November 24, although the official cut-off date was December 4 (now extended to December 11). This, he claimed, was to make up for the delays in the digitisation process.

Dutta's claims were backed by media reports which stated that many BLOs were unofficially asked to collect all forms by November 26.

The BJP, meanwhile, pointed the finger of blame solely at the TMC.

Ashok Sinha, former spokesperson of the Bengal BJP, stressed that "the ruling party was creating the pressure".

He accused the TMC of "going into their areas and various slums and asking people not to delete the names of dead voters from the list". Sinha alleged the ruling party uses the names of these dead voters' to cast fake votes.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the body that governs the Aadhaar database, reportedly informed the Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal, Manoj Agarwal, that there are 32-34 lakh people in West Bengal whose Aadhaar cards have been deactivated due to their death. Reports stated that high-level Election Commission officials have noted that this data can be used as a parameter to list out the dead voters in the SIR drive.

Then there are the instances of Booth Level Assistants from both parties trying to overstep, including by blocking BLOs from going door-to-door.

A BLO stated the obvious, noting that everyone wants control. "We are stuck in the middle."

Quiet resignation                                  

"How many more bodies?" CM Mamata Banerjee, who was opposed to the SIR exercise being held now, had asked after Rinku’s death.

The BJP dismissed her outrage as political theatre while accusing her of shielding "illegal elements".

In the middle of this political to-and-fro lie the BLOs who despite death, desperation, exhaustion and fear, are unable to question the SIR exercise and the manner in which they have been made to go about it.

There is an air of quiet resignation among most of them. As a BLO summed it up, "We believe in the SIR. That is why we work so hard. We have done this during COVID, during demonetisation…"

Yes, they have had to do it always. So, most grit their teeth and do it. Except not everybody can and therein lies the tragedy of what has followed from a rushed and not fully thought-through exercise.

(If you are having suicidal thoughts, or are worried about a friend or need emotional support, someone is always there to listen. Call Sneha Foundation - 04424640050, Tele Manas - 14416 (available 24x7) or iCall, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences' helpline - 02225521111, which is available Monday to Saturday from 8 am to 10 pm.)