Deletions, deadlines and doubt: Second leg of Bihar's poll roll drive throws up stark choices

Under a pewter sky, Mintu Devi is hurrying back home. Charcoal-edged clouds are starting to give way to clots of darkness. In her village of Khak Maksudpur in Bihar's Gopalganj district, this is a warning. Near the horizon, the greys still soften into a faint wash of silver-blue and the river is mellow. But once the ochre hue dissolves, the Gandak river will rage.

- Dhrubo Jyoti, Anirban Guha Roy and Aditya Nath Jha

This village - one of hundreds located in sandy riverine islands that flood with alarming regularity - once boasted of more than 1,000 residents.

“But now, only 350 are left. Those of us who cannot go anywhere,” said Mintu, an anganwadi worker. Villages get marooned during the monsoon, often during high tide at night, forcing the able-bodied to scurry to the embankment or the highway. It takes grit, and preparation, to live here. “But for us poor, where is the choice between dukh (sorrow) and sukh (happiness)?” she asked.

Her days are stacked with chores. Her husband and three sons head out at sunrise, and she walks down to the anganwadi after cooking for the family. She was lucky to have been home when enumeration forms for the special intensive revision (SIR) were distributed last month, but the seasonal distress migration ensured that hundreds weren't. In this booth, out of 840 registered voters, 398 were considered shifted and eight dead, chalking up an exclusion rate of nearly 50%.

The poorly lettered family depended on the BLO (booth level officer) to fill their form and submit it. But now, the officials are back, demanding documents. “We stand in line at the block office everyday but they keep asking us to come back. We don’t know when our niwasi (permanent residence certificate) will come,” Mintu said. “What is being asked for is very difficult.”

‘Across the village dominated by fisherfolk and farm labourers from the extremely backward classes (EBCs), the same complaint echoed. Indrapal Prasad said the BLO wasn't clear that mere Aadhaar won't do and more documents were needed. Mamdeo Prasad complained that the village chief Bindu Devi wasn't available to issue letters on the panchayat letterhead. And assistant BLO Chanda Eram confirmed that the verification process, which should have begun long ago, was flagging because she could collect documents from only two to three people everyday.