India’s new suicide crisis: Poll workers take lives amid voter recount rush 

Lucknow, India – Harshit Verma believes his 50-year-old father, Vijay Kumar Verma, died because he was handling an “inhuman task”.

Vijay, a contractual government teacher in Lucknow, the capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh state, was hired as a booth-level officer (BLO) to conduct a revision of the voter list in his constituency, as part of an enormous electoral exercise involving millions of BLOs across the world’s most populous country.

The exercise, called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), was launched by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on November 4, across 12 states and federally governed territories, to update the electoral rolls by adding eligible voters through house-to-house enumeration and removing ineligible people. The exercise will be repeated in the remaining states in phases.

According to a handbook for BLOs on the ECI’s website, their responsibilities range from doing house visits to identifying existing and dead voters, collecting their photos and other relevant documents, and uploading them on a designated portal. The BLOs, who are mostly government teachers or junior officials, have complained of their immense work pressure. A single mistake means the entire process of filling out the forms and uploading them has to be done again.

A report last week by the Spect Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank, said at least 33 BLOs have died across India since November 4, at least nine of whom took their own lives and left desperate accounts of their work pressure in their suicide notes.

Vijay did not die by suicide. He collapsed on November 14 while completing SIR work late at night at his home in Lucknow’s Sarava village, and was rushed to hospital. He died of a brain haemorrhage 10 days later.

“Since he had joined the BLO duty, his phone continuously rang. We saw him working from morning till late night,” Vijay’s sister-in-law, Shashi Verma, told Al Jazeera.

Harshit, 20, said he had read text messages sent by district officials to his father, repeatedly telling him to do more work or “face consequences”.

“Quickly complete 200 forms. If it’s less than that, you will be charged,” he recalled one of the messages as saying.

“We have received no support from the government,” Harshit told Al Jazeera, as he stood with his mother, Sangeeta Rawat, outside the Lucknow offices of the Samajwadi Party, an opposition party supporting their protest.

“The senior district magistrate visited us after my father’s death, but only paid condolences and told me to focus on my studies,” he said.

‘Barely two hours of sleep every day’

Al Jazeera spoke to two other BLOs in Lucknow who refused to reveal their identities over fears it could invite the wrath of the government and jeopardise their jobs.

“I have been functioning with barely two hours of sleep every day. On many days, I didn’t even sleep at all,” said a 45-year-old BLO who works as a teacher at a government school in Lucknow.

Another BLO, also a teacher at a village school in the same district, said her phone numbers have been made public and her devices now ring at odd hours. “People call me late at night and ask me to correct their details or find if their name is in another list,” she said.

The BLO said that most people in villages do not keep an electronic version of their documents, unlike residents in cities. “Quite often, when we visit these villagers to collect their details, they would take a long time going through their trunks or cupboards to find their papers. It is a common problem.”

She said BLOs return to their homes in the evening after a long day of work and continue to upload forms online until late into the night. “Quite often, the server does not work, and I upload forms at 4 in the morning to avoid this issue,” the 35-year-old said.

“I would get worried that my mobile phone’s battery will run out, so I would always keep plugging it in to charge whenever possible,” she added.

The BLOs’ biggest concern, she said, was to complete their work within the one-month deadline given by the ECI, a process for which she said they were not given proper training.

“It was just a two- [to] three-hour briefing in which we were told how to collect and upload data. That’s it,” the BLO in rural Lucknow said.

In Uttar Pradesh, the deadline to finish the SIR process has been extended twice: first to December 11, and then to December 26. The exercise ended in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat states on December 14, and will end in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, and Andaman and Nicobar on December 18.

Controversial exercise

The eastern state of Bihar was the first to go through a revision of its electoral rolls this year, after a gap of more than two decades. In July, the SIR was launched in Bihar before its legislative assembly elections in November, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged for the first time as the single largest party.

In the run-up to the polls, Bihar’s opposition parties had demanded a rollback of the SIR, accusing the ECI of rushing through a mammoth electoral exercise that could render vast numbers of citizens unable to vote. In September, the ECI published its final voter list for Bihar, removing 4.7 million names from the rolls.

In Seemanchal, a Muslim-majority region in Bihar’s northeast, voter removals exceeded the state average, prompting allegations by opposition parties and Muslim groups that the ECI was especially targeting Muslim voters, who generally do not vote for the BJP, for removal.

The BJP’s thumping win in Bihar triggered accusations by the losing coalition of a “vote chori” (“chori” means stealing in Hindi). Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Indian National Congress party, last month called the SIR “a sinister plan of the Election Commission to destroy democracy”.

In response, Union Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah said in a speech in parliament that the real “vote chori” happened under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather and grandmother who were also former Indian prime ministers.

As the political debate over the electoral exercise ramped up, it continued to destroy lives. In Bihar, at least two BLOs died during the revision of the electoral rolls.

On November 9, five days after the SIR was announced in a dozen other Indian states and federal territories, Namita Handa, a 50-year-old rural health worker, died of a stroke while she was on duty in West Bengal’s East Burdwan district. Her husband, Madhab Hansda, blamed the SIR workload for her sudden death.

On November 22, Rinku Tarafdar, a 53-year-old biology teacher recruited as a BLO, was found dead at her residence in Nadia district of West Bengal.

In her two-page suicide note, Tarafdar blamed the ECI. “I do not support any political party, but I cannot handle this inhumane pressure anymore”, she wrote, adding that she was threatened with an “administrative process” if she failed to do the required work.

At least four BLOs died during the SIR in West Bengal. On Monday, the ECI published a draft voter list for the state, which removed about 5.8 million people. The deleted names were marked as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate voters.

‘Barely ate or slept’

Anuj Garg worked as a teacher in a government school in Dholpur city in the western state of Rajasthan. On the night of November 30, he fell to the ground while working at his laptop at his home and died of cardiac arrest. He was 44 and had two children.

“He asked for tea at around 1am, but by the time it came, we had lost him,” his sister, Anjana Garg, told Al Jazeera. “In the last month, he barely ate or slept. We only saw him working without a break.”

Anuj had previously worked as a BLO. But Anjana said the pressure this year was extraordinary. Despite working around the clock, he had received notices from his supervisors warning him to meet his targets, she said, adding that the death by suicide of another BLO in the state had added to his stress.

On the night of December 1, Sarvesh Singh, a 46-year-old BLO in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad district, died by suicide while his wife and four daughters were sleeping in another room. Singh left a note and a final video, purportedly recorded by his wife.

“I failed in this election,” he said in the video, adding that he was losing his mental stability due to a lack of sleep and excessive pressure. In the note, he wrote: “I used to work day and night, but still could not finish my target.”

The ECI has rejected accusations of workloads leading to the deaths of dozens of BLOs across the country.

“The SIR work is very normal. It is not that the BLOs are doing it for the first time,” ECI spokesman Apurva Kumar Singh told Al Jazeera, calling the deaths unfortunate. He said the work was “not overburdening at all”, adding that the ECI was taking required action, without specifying what that action is.

The commission recently doubled the compensation for BLOs to 1,000 rupees ($11) in addition to their salaries, and announced an incentive of 6,000 rupees ($66) upon the completion of an election cycle.

Sapan Mondal, the general secretary of the Kolkata-based Election Staff and Booth Level Officer Forum, said the Election Commission provided no training to the BLOs before pushing them into the enormous exercise.

“When the BLO duty was assigned, nothing was provided, not even devices or data entry operators to help those who don’t know how to work online,” he told Al Jazeera.

As criticism mounted, the ECI on December 1 posted a video on its X account showing a group of BLOs dancing to “relieve their stress”.

The video added to the outrage. Social media users called the commission’s move insensitive. The ECI has not officially responded to the criticism.

Meanwhile, petitions have been filed in several courts against the SIR by opposition politicians, victims’ families and the Association for Democratic Reforms, a prominent watchdog on India’s election processes.

Many affected families said they have been waiting for government support after losing their loved ones, who were often their sole breadwinners.

“We want the money we spent on our father’s untimely death, and a government job for me. Are we asking for a lot?” Harshit asked as he held a 200,000-rupee ($2,200) cheque given to his family by the opposition Samajwadi Party.

If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, these organisations may be able to help.