Special Intensive Revision duty: EC sanctions Rs 6,000 one-time payout for booth-level staff working on voter list revision

PTC Web Desk: Booth-level officers and their supervisors who have been going door to door as part of the country's ongoing voter list overhaul are getting a financial thank-you from the Election Commission of India. In an order issued late Tuesday night, the poll body cleared a one-time honorarium of Rs 6,000 for every BLO and BLO Supervisor deployed on Special Intensive Revision (SIR) duty, a payment that comes on top of whatever they already earn annually for this work.

The order covers every state and Union Territory currently running the SIR drive — Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh among them, alongside Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Delhi, Odisha, Sikkim, Telangana, Tripura and Uttarakhand.

Explaining the decision, the Commission pointed to the sheer scale of fieldwork the exercise demands from ground-level staff, most of whom are teachers, clerks or other government employees pulled in for election duty on top of their regular jobs. The instruction has been passed down to Chief Electoral Officers in all the listed states and UTs, who have in turn been told to ensure it reaches everyone concerned.

What exactly is the SIR exercise?

Special Intensive Revision is essentially a ground-up clean-up of India's electoral rolls. Instead of the routine annual updates, SIR sends BLOs physically to every household in their assigned booth area to check who's actually living there, help eligible residents get enrolled, flag voters who have died or shifted permanently, and identify cases where the same person shows up on the rolls at more than one address. Where a house is found locked on the first visit, officers are required to go back and try again, often multiple times, before marking the household as unreached.