Losing count in Bihar

Time is of essence for any drive to verify electorate’s documents and ensure voter rolls are robust

Supreme Court’s directive that Aadhaar must be accepted for claims, by Bihar’s voters who were wrongly deleted, was foretold. India is struggling to synchronise two systems, paper-driven and digital-led, as it tries to transition to a tech interface between state and citizen. The scary joke is that Aadhaar is established as a flawed tech because its subcontractor layers are unregulated, but the identity’s universality has made it an essential ID to simply move things along – a gas connection to a phone connection. That is not to say, as SC observed, that birth certificates or any of the remaining 11 documents allowed for voter roll inclusion cannot be forged. 

With 20 days to go before voter rolls for Bihar’s assembly election are finalised, another SIR-driven exercise has created confusion – rationalisation of poll booths so each has no more than 1,200 voters, down from 1,500. Poll booths have increased to almost 91k from around 77k. Booths are re-numbered and BLOs are newly assigned. All efficiently done. But voters wanting to use Aadhaar, and those raising objections, must deal with a new BLO. The new BLO has barely 15 days to source voters’ documents from his predecessor BLO. Names may be all digitised but not all documents of verification are uploaded. With poll booths re-numbered, the handover is confusing BLOs, hampering the verification drive. 

It’s this kind of chaos that a hurried SIR cannot avoid. As it is, EC’s counsel told court that petitioners’ insistence on Aadhaar is to onboard ‘illegal migrants’ – an indictment of Aadhaar and indicative of an approach more exclusionary than inclusionary. Bihar SIR has shown that digitisation/tech can’t be solutions in and of themselves, and that any exercise to ensure robust voter rolls needs time for thorough review. Any SIR held mere months ahead of any polls simply risks losing count.

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