BLOs protest in Kolkata against fresh workload, clash with police

Chaos prevailed outside the Central Kolkata office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of West Bengal on Monday (December 22, 2025) when hundreds of booth-level officers (BLOs) clashed with the police.

Citing the increasing work pressure owing to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a section of BLOs under the banner of the BLO Adhikar Raksha Committee and believed to be supporters of the ruling Trinamool Congress, had been carrying out a sit-in outside the CEO’s office at Netaji Subhas Road in Central Kolkata for about a month. 

However, the situation escalated on Monday as hundreds of BLOs, protesting against the additional burden of “new tasks on the BLO app’, marched to the CEO’s office from multiple directions, clashed with the police, and tried breaching barricades to enter the office.

New tasks

The latest update on the BLO mobile app added a new feature for the BLOs to re-verify logical discrepancies in elector details in the enumeration forms and upload signed undertakings to confirm correct mapping with the 2002 list. Around 1.36 crore enumeration forms across the State have been flagged for logical discrepancies, especially concerning progeny links, when compared with the 2002 list.

Another new feature introduced in the BLO app on Monday morning tasks the BLOs with the delivery of hearing notices. According to sources in the CEO’s office, when a BLO delivers a hearing notice to a voter, both the voter and the BLO must sign a form provided by the commission, acknowledging that the voter has received the notice. This form must then be uploaded on the app, a source said.

“We have been protesting here for 29 days. We believe it was an unplanned decision to carry out SIR in such a short span of time and impose this massive workload on the BLOs. Five BLOs died in West Bengal alone. Despite all this, we finished the enumeration work by December 11. Now the commission is introducing new tasks for us and has kept us engaged till February 14,” Moidul Islam, the convener of the BLO Adhikar Raksha Committee, told The Hindu.

He alleged that several voters could not be mapped to the 2002 list due to mismatches in names arising from AI-based translation of the 2002 list.  

“We are now being asked to go from house to house to re-verify electors who have recorded logical discrepancies. We have also been told to deliver the notices for hearings. We want to meet the CEO and tell him that around 20,000 to 25,000 BLOs are refusing to work for SIR any more and wish to return to their regular duties in schools,” Mr. Islam said.

Will BLOs work or check app, asks CM

Hours before the protests erupted, similar arguments were made by the Chief Minister in her speech addressing the Trinamool’s booth-level agents at Kolkata’s Netaji Indoor Stadium on Monday. 

 “Every day, the BLO app gets new updates. Even a BLO is a human being… So many different instructions are being given in such a short span of time. Will BLOs work or check the app for updates every day?” the Chief Minister said at the meeting. 

Accusing the Election Commission of being a ‘BJP Commission’, the Chief Minister asked if the BLOs were adequately trained for the SIR exercise before they were blamed for mistakes. She alleged that several genuine voters could not establish links to the 2002 list owing to language-related differences between the voters’ list of 2002 and 2025. 

Earlier, faced with similar protests by aggrieved BLOs and security breaches at the CEO’s office, the Commission had directed the Kolkata Police Commissioner to deploy adequate forces for the security of the staff, and to relocate the office to a different location.

On December 18, 2025, the Commission wrote to the Union Home Ministry seeking immediate deployment of Central forces both at the current and relocated premises of the CEO’s office, citing a “law and order” situation following protests by BLOs.