Paper trails, lost salaries: Stories of struggle, success in Bihar SIR drive

The first phase of the controversial special intensive revision (SIR) in Bihar excised 6.56 million names from the state’s voter rolls, The exclusions have generated a political firestorm and reverberated in Parliament and the Supreme Court. But another key facet are the 72.4 million people who managed to fill their forms. Across five districts, HT attempts to sketch the contours of the exercise, shaped by identities, differing access to government services, migration and socioeconomic status.

- Dhrubo Jyoti, Anirban Guha Roy and Aditya Nath Jha

Chandan Das, Tilhari Village

A flight of three steep steps leads a visitor to the meeting room of Tilhari village chief Shakunta Deviand her husband, Chandan Das. Under framed faces of Bhagat Singh, BR Ambedkar and Ravidas, the room teems with clots of people anxious about their names on the electoral roll ~one has brother toiling away in Hyderabad who cannot come back to fill the forms, a second has no document other than Aadhaar card in her name since her marriage in this village five years ago, and a third is worried that she might have missed her BLO and will be marked absent.

In this peri-urban village of 900-odd people dominated by marginalised castes, a white sheet of paper stamped with the panchayat logo, signed by Das, and a photograph of the applicant affixed is lucrative. Das has signed roughly 250 of these letters since July 1, filling the gap in access to formal documentation.

“In our village, most are poor. The problem here is birth certificates and only 10% of people have caste papers. So what else can we do to help them?” asked Das, who was once associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

In his early 30s, the husband of the village chief unofficially executes many of the official functions of his wife. He had thought that the publication of the draft roll on August | would mean an end to the frenetic pace of work. “Not a lot of names in this village were deleted so that’s a relief. It means the letters worked,” he said.

But now, there is a new problem.

“Naam bohot ka gadbad kar diya hai (they've made a lot of mistakes with the names) - Rai in place of Ram, father-in-law in place of father,” Das said. “I went through the draft list for an hour with the BLO and found 6-7 such mistakes,” he added.