Kolkata, Jan 10 (IANS) Amid the controversies of the Enforcement Directorate (ED)’s raid and search operations at the office of the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) and the residence of the entity’s co-founder Pratik Jain on Thursday, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has decided to conduct a review of the complaints received about I-PAC staff allegedly being appointed as data-entry operators in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal after being shown as contractual state government employees.

Insiders from the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, said that the commission had decided to conduct a random re-checking of the backgrounds of the contractual state government employees being appointed as data-entry operators in the current revision exercise.

The Commission, CEO’s office insiders said, is especially stressing the re-checking of the police verification reports that needed to be done mandatorily for these contractual state government employees before appointing them as the data-entry operators in the revision exercise as per the ECI guidelines.

The Commission had taken the complaints of the I-PAC staff being appointed as data-entry operators seriously, considering the crucial nature of the clerical work done by them in the revision exercise.

The main task of the data-entry operators is to make manual entry of the details of the enumeration forms of the voters collected by the Booth-Level Officers (BLOs) and submitted to the Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and the Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) concerned.

Hence, erroneous entries, inadvertent or willful, made at this stage could impact the final decision on the fate of voters in retaining their names in the final voters’ list. Already after the enumeration stage, which was the first stage of the three-stage SIR exercise, there had been instances of wrong entries causing inconvenience for a certain section of voters.

Hence, the CEO’s office insiders said, the Commission is taking the demand of re-checking the backgrounds of the contractual state government employees appointed as data-entry operators quite seriously.

The draft voters’ list in West Bengal was published on December 16 last year. The final voters’ list will be published on February 14 next year. Soon after that, the ECI will announce the polling dates for the crucial Assembly elections in West Bengal, scheduled for next year.

–IANS

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