Telangana SIR: Political parties save the day as BLOs sail through unknown territories to decide voters’ fate

A poster promoting the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the Electoral Rolls-2026 is displayed in Hyderabad on 24 June 2026. | Photo credit: Ramakrishna G

Enrollment of citizens in the ongoing process of a special intensive review of electoral rolls could only be successful to the extent that there is a competent official in the booth or the voter is informed.

The house-to-house distribution of enumeration forms, which entered its 10th day on Saturday, proves the same. The only exceptions are areas where political parties actively participate in order to reach as many voters as possible.

In most areas, BLOs have no idea about the areas and houses to be covered. They come from multiple departments with almost no public contact and are unable to understand the vague maps provided to them in the mobile app.

Instead, some only visit houses from where they receive calls or those taken by political party operatives at booth level.

BLOs are drawn from 10-15 departments including urban development, health, women and child welfare, education, revenue and even roads and buildings. They have all kinds of job description like Record Assistants, Junior and Senior Assistants, ASHA Workers, Anganwadi Workers, Sanitary Jawans and more.

Although their designation is Booth Level Officer, in most cases they are not even remotely connected to the polling station they have been assigned.

To complicate matters, they get polling stations far from the areas they are comfortable with, so several of them struggle with maps and can’t understand which houses fall under their purview.

“I work as a binder in a government printing press. About 200 of our press have been marked as BLOs, all in remote areas. I often end up on the streets and wonder where I am,” said Venkatram (name changed), a BLO who is assigned to cover parts of the Malakpet constituency.

He starts his day at 9 a.m. and ends around midnight, spending most of his time calling constituents whose phone numbers are available on the app.

“It’s easier to navigate that way,” he says, “but the AIMIM workers are very helpful. They have absolute information about every voter in the respective polling stations.”

In fact, MIM has designed a mobile app which has information about all voters and is much better than the mobile app available for BLOs.

“The BLOs in our area are ASHA and Anganwadi workers who can’t even spell names correctly. I had to correct my name and phone number three to four times before they hit. How can we expect them to help us in filling forms or finding our names in the previous SIR list?” asked V. Anuradha, a resident of LB Nagar.

“The BLO I visited did not know that the forms have to be collected before July 24. When I asked when he would collect the form back, he said after July 24,” said D. Latha, another resident of BN Reddy Nagar.

However, officials say the BLOs have received sufficient training to complete the job properly.

“A month-long exercise was conducted in the name of mapping before the SIR, during which the BLOs were relieved of their regular duties. The BLOs should already be well acquainted with the localities if they participated in the mapping,” says an election officer.

Published – 4 Jul 2026 23:48 IST