Another Bengal BLO suffers cerebral attack; family blames SIR work overload

KOlkata: A 60-year-old booth-level ship's officer (BLO) meshed by the Election charge of republic of india (ECI) for the on-going Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in West Bengal suffered a cerebral attack during duty in North 24 Parganas district’s Konnagar town on Wednesday evening, her family said.This comes just hours after another BLO died by suicide in the Mal area of Jalpaiguri district on Wednesday morning, with her family claiming she could not handle the work pressure.Tapati Biswas, an Anganwadi worker entrusted with the SIR at the town’s polling booth number 279, was admitted to the Konnagar Matrisadan Hospital, her husband Prabir Kumar Biswas said.“My wife had been complaining about excessive work pressure. She couldn’t sleep at night. She kept saying if she gave up midway then she might be arrested and lose her Anganwadi job on which we depend,” Prabir, a retired jute mill worker, said.The doctor who treated the BLO, Sanjay Shee, said, “Her blood sugar and blood pressure levels were both high. She was not treated on time. A CT scan showed she had suffered a cerebral attack. The movement of her left arm has been affected as a result.”West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee targeted the poll body after Wednesday’s morning incident. “Today again, we lost a Booth Level Officer in Mal, Jalpaiguri, a tribal lady, an anganwadi worker who took her own life under the unbearable pressure of the ongoing SIR work. 28 people have already lost their lives since SIR began — some due to fear and uncertainty, others due to stress and overload,” Banerjee wrote on X.Earlier, a BLO at the Memari community block in East Burdwan district died of a cerebral attack on November 9. Her husband had also alleged that she was under stress.The CM pointed out the hurried manner in which the SIR was being conducted and said, “Such precious lives are being lost because of the unplanned, relentless workload imposed by the so-called Election Commission of India. A process that earlier took 3 years is now being forced into 2 months on the eve of elections to please political masters, putting inhuman pressure on BLOs.”Countering this, Bharatiya Janata Party’s Suvendu Adhikari, the leader of the opposition in the state assembly, claimed that SIR had nothing to do with the deaths.“SIR was conducted in Bihar. It is going on in 11 other states and Union territories right now. Nobody has died anywhere except Bengal,” Adhikari said.The state’s chief electoral officer (CEO) Manoj Kumar Agarwal sought a report from the Jalpaiguri district magistrate on the death by suicide, but his office did not comment on the Konnagar incident till Wednesday night.BLOs across Bengal are currently entrusted with the distribution and collection of enumeration forms, an exercise to be completed by December 4. Many have complained about work pressure and even staged protests over the past weeks.The first draft electoral roll will be published on December 9, the EC has said. Assembly polls in Bengal are expected to be held around March–April 2026.West Bengal has around 76 million voters. There are around 80,681 polling booths and an equal number of BLOs.