A wave of suicides and sudden deaths among Booth-Level Officers (BLOs) across India was reported without much media attention towards the end of 2025. The deaths clearly point to the coercion, overwork, and institutional apathy from the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and its creator the Election Commission (EC), which turned the BLOs into victims of a high-pressure exercise. From various reports, there have been at least 37 deaths of BLOs in West Bengal, UP, Rajasthan, Gujarat, MP, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. Families and colleagues have shared that these deaths, including suicides and medical emergencies, were linked to work stress. The BLOs are thus the newest victims of SIR following the migrant workers, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, who have been lynched in different corners of India.
BLOs are the lowest level workers in the hierarchy, given tasks for voter verification, door-to-door surveys, data collection, and grass-root level implementation of countless, sometimes arbitrary, directives from the Election Commission. BLOs are typically school teachers, clerks, Anganwadi workers- already overworked and underpaid in their primary job. On top of this, election duty is imposed on them as compulsory service, often without consent, adequate training, strict time targets, with minimal pay and no support. They are set daily targets (often 150-200 households per day), monitored closely, and threatened by superiors if they fail to meet them. Many have raised complaints regarding having to work from dawn till midnight, with no lunch breaks, and no rest. Suicide notes left by some of the officers repeatedly mention ‘impossible workloads’, ‘excessive pressure from superiors’, and a state of complete helplessness. BLOs have spoken about patterns of the officers collapsing at home after working for days continuously, teachers found dead in their classrooms, and workers dying of heart attacks and hemorrhages after weeks of 20 hour work days, with just 2-3 hours of sleep.
The suicide notes and final messages of BLOs paint a harrowing picture of despair and helplessness. Arvind Vadher, a BLO from Gujarat, wrote: “I can no longer continue this SIR work. I have been feeling exhausted and troubled for several days. Take care of yourself and our son. I love both of you very much, but now I feel completely helpless. I have no option left anymore.” In Kerala, Aneesh George, a 44-year-old BLO from Kannur, was found hanging; his family cited the same reason: unbearable work pressure from the SIR exercise. In Noida, at least 81 BLOs were booked for ‘dereliction of duty’ for not completing their SIR work, adding legal and professional fear to their already crushing workload.
The Election Commission dismissed any connection between these repeated patterns of death with the workloads created by the SIR, claiming them to be due to ‘personal health issues’ and ‘unrelated to duty’. It has not acknowledged the scale of BLO deaths or announced any compensation for the families, nor has it paused the SIR exercise despite the increasing public outrage.
The revision exercise is heavily document-dependent, an RSS-BJP-driven campaign that attacked the right to vote of the poor, migrants, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and other minority groups, who are alien to their core voter blocs. SIR is being conducted under rict, rushed verification, and we have seen waves of reports showing the deletion of lakhs of peoples’ names from the voter
list, enough to change electoral outcomes, as seen in the case of Bihar. The EC’s clear subservience to the fascist BJP-RSS also becomes evident from the aggressive, high-pressure revision going on in multiple states, combined with its long periods of silence on the wave of deaths of BLOs and multiple cases of vote theft. They reveal a ‘democracy’ built on coercion, money and muscle power, and exploitation of the masses for the benefit of a very few on top. It is about who bears the cost of maintaining this facade of a democracy and who reaps the benefits.
The clear connection between the SIR and the NRC-CAA is not lost on anyone. The tremendous mass movement against NRC-CAA forced the government to back-off temporarily. Now the snatching of citizenship is taking the insidious form of SIR propped by the ECI. Multiple campaigns and protests have been ongoing in India against this exercise for the past few months. These have recently been joined by unions of teachers, Anganwadi workers, and other government employees protesting their workloads. For many years, they have been demanding reasonable working hours, voluntary participation, the right to refuse, increased pay, and recently, mental health support. These basic demands have not been accepted by the EC, the all-powerful body that oversees the elections in the world’s largest democracy. The refusal to meet these basic demands shows how the government prioritises disenfranchisement over protection of rights.
