Sunetra Pawar Directs NCP to Prioritize Voter Roll Revision in Maharashtra

Maha: Sunetra Pawar asks NCP cadre to take SIR seriously

Mumbai, May 26

She further directed that the Block Level Agents (BLAs) should cooperate with the Block Level Officers (BLOs) in all the 288 Assembly constituencies during the SIR and thereby use the opportunity to further strengthen the party organisation at the district, tehsil, block, and booth levels.

A party functionary who was present at the meeting said: "The party president, Sunetra Pawar, has asked the ministers, legislators, and office-bearers to take SIR seriously so that genuine voters are not excluded. She also asked them to work on a war footing between June 30 and July 29, especially during the door-to-door enumeration."

During the meeting, party ministers Chhagan Bhujbal and Hasan Mushrif, and former state Assembly Speaker Dilip Walse Patil, shared a slew of initiatives already taken to implement SIR in their respective constituencies.

The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) meeting took place days after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recently asked its cadre to "take lessons from West Bengal", where 64 lakh ineligible voter names were deleted from the electoral rolls.

The meeting, chaired by state party president Ravindra Chavan, saw more than 700 party members, including MPs, MLAs, and office-bearers, being briefed on the SIR exercise, along with a broader template of dos and don'ts.

Urging party workers to take the SIR seriously, senior BJP leaders called for greater participation to ensure no eligible voters were skipped and no ineligible voters made it to the list.

On the other hand, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena also directed workers to set aside their current tasks and focus entirely on SIR.

"Workers have also been instructed to file a complaint if any BLO acts unfairly or incorrectly. Our voters are the key to our success; if they are removed, what will happen? Therefore, take absolute care to ensure our voters are not excluded," party workers were told during the Shiv Sena meeting.

Moreover, the state Chief Electoral Officer, S. Chockalingam, announced that the extensive exercise would see a physical, door-to-door verification of approximately 9.86 crore electors across Maharashtra under the SIR campaign from June to October.

This is aimed at purifying the electoral database and will be carried out through 1,00,253 Booth Level Officers (BLOs).

He said that, to ensure complete fairness and eliminate biases, political parties had been requested to deploy Booth Level Agents (BLAs) to assist the BLOs.

So far, 1,13,558 BLAs have been appointed across the state by political parties, with the Election Commission of India (ECI) urging parties to maximise appointments ahead of the June launch.

Local poll bodies will soon host joint meetings with recognised political parties to seamlessly coordinate the massive field exercise.

Responding to demands by the opposition regarding maintaining transparency in conducting the SIR, Chockalingam said the draft list of proposed deletions would be shared transparently with recognised political parties at the Assembly constituency level.

BLAs appointed by political parties have the legal right to scrutinise these lists, raise objections, and challenge any wrongful deletion during the revision period before the final roll is published.

— IANS