By Esha Mitra, CNN
Noida, India (CNN) — A gargantuan task is underway to update the longest voter list in the world. This is India, and that’s nearly a billion people whose details need to be verified before they’re allowed to participate in the world’s largest democracy.
Across the country, tens of thousands of civil servants are rushing to input voter details into a database, by hand. And the deadline is Friday for India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.
The last list dates from 2003 and authorities say it needs cleaning up to reflect mass migration from the countryside to the cities, the accumulation of deceased voters and to remove those on the list illegally.
Twelve states and union territories –– home to some 500 million people –– have been making updates since early November, vetting which voters can participate in the next polls.
Schoolteacher Prem Lata is one of the over 500,000 government employees that have been pulled into the undertaking. Since early November she has been waking up at five in the morning, with her shifts often dragging late into the night. For this work, she and other Booth Level Officers, are paid an extra 1,000 rupees ($11) per month.
“There’s a lot of stress and pressure… and not enough time,” she told CNN at her school outside the capital New Delhi that now is her office.
“We spend all day doing this, and even until 12 or 1 am in the night so of course there’s stress, and my body hurts. It’s a human body after all, not a machine.”
The ordeal isn’t helped by India’s Byzantine bureaucracy.
Since 2003, countless people have moved hundreds of miles for new jobs. Many women have married and taken their husband’s surname. And a large number of people, especially those who are poorer, do not have knowledge of the registration process, nor possess one of the 12 accepted government-issued documents needed for verification.
In India’s rambunctious and frenetic political system, tinkering with the voter list attracts enormous scrutiny, and even litigation.
Critics of the ruling Hindu-nationalist government say it is using the exercise to exclude minorities, something the government denies.
Opposition parties have claimed their local councilors have been wrongly declared dead. Dozens of legal cases have been filed against Booth Level Officers for alleged negligence of duty, and according to data submitted in parliament, there have even been more than a dozen cases of election workers committing suicide under the pressure.
‘Untraceable’
At their school in Noida, a sprawling recent outgrow of the capital New Delhi, Lata and seven other Booth Level Officers are working the phones and chasing down the last names on their lists. Their students sit in the sun coloring in their notebooks –– in school, but effectively on holiday.
“Send me the details on WhatsApp; otherwise, your name will get deleted,” Lata says to someone who hasn’t returned the required forms yet. “Today is the last day, then don’t ask me later why it was cancelled.”
Lata was given 945 voters to verify, of which she has managed to complete 600 so far. “Of the remaining, some have moved, and some are dead, and others are untraceable,” she told CNN.
As well as tardiness, others are simply not convinced they need to cooperate, said Ruby Verma, another Booth Level Officer.
“People say I’m already registered as a voter so why do you need all these details again, they don’t get the verification concept,” she added. “It’s a thankless process.”
India has revised its national voter list eight times since it gained independence from Britain in 1947 and became the world’s biggest democracy.
The last time it did so, in 2003, the national electorate was roughly 600 million people and the process took place over 6 months.
This time authorities gave booth officers just one month to verify around 500 million voters across the 12 states and union territories. That deadline has been extended twice for most states, and three times in the country’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, where officers like Lata struggle to find some electors and people struggle to find the necessary documents.
Geeta Rana, 40, is one of those people. Since the list was last updated she has moved home and taken her husband’s surname. Her parents have also died, and she doesn’t know which constituency they previously voted in, a detail necessary to verify that she is a legitimate voter.
“My daughter is 19 so she is registering to vote this year,” Rana told CNN. “But her vote would be linked to mine, and if mine doesn’t get verified, then it’s not just my vote that’s lost, it’s hers too.”
It’s a common difficulty at Lata’s school. Many trying to get their voting rights verified are migrant workers from out of state, making tracking down documents and parents’ details more complicated.
Millions of names removed
Critics of the government say it is using the exercise to remove supporters of its opponents from the voter list.
In West Bengal, another state currently verifying its electoral roll, more than 5.8 million people have been deleted according to the draft list published December 16.
Nearly half of those names are deceased — including at least one councilor of the All India Trinamool Congress, according to the party, which is one of Modi’s biggest opponents and currently governs the state.
Similarly, millions of names have been deleted from voter lists of states like Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat according to drafts published earlier this month.
Other opposition parties and activists have pointed out that the documents officials are asking electors to submit, instead of their existing voter IDs, are those that are typically used to establish citizenship.
India’s home minister Amit Shah has defended the process. The revision of the voter lists is “nothing but a verification of legitimate voters,” he said in parliament recently.
“Should a person be able to vote in more than one place, should those who have died be included in the voter list?”
In Lata’s home state of Uttar Pradesh, multiple police complaints have been registered against workers drafted in to update the voter lists, for alleged breaches of “official duty.”
“I’ve been working as a teacher for two decades, so the idea that I could lose my job after all these years of course is scary. But we are going above and beyond to complete this task because we also don’t want people to lose their vote,” Lata said.
As stress levels rise and the deadline approaches, Lata and her colleagues make the most of the lighter moments.
Like the difficulties posed by two neighbors both named Suraj Chauhan, whose parents also shared similar names. Or the eight different people in eight different neighborhoods who all appeared to have the same father.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s going to end,” said Lata. “It’s relentless and we still haven’t matched all voters so if they extend the deadline that would be good – otherwise we’ll just have to submit what we have.”
Dates for when the rest of India’s states will go through the same process haven’t been finalized yet, but authorities want to get it done by the next general election, scheduled for 2029.
But the work doesn’t end for Lata, even when her state submits its new roll.
“Once this is done we have to get into registering new voters,” she said. “And then elections will be upon us and of course we have to get back to the actually job we are being paid for: teaching kids.”
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