According to Deputy Commissioner, Ananya Mittal, the district administration was working with an objective to ensure that every eligible voter is added to the electoral roll despite the region facing several challenges.
The Naxal affected West Singhbhum district of Jharkhand has enrolled the maximum number of new voters across the state during the periodic election-related exercise, Special Summary Revision (SSR) (2022).
According to Deputy Commissioner Ananya Mittal, the district administration was working with an objective to ensure that every eligible voter is added to the electoral roll despite the challenges that were posed by the pandemic and other inhospitable elements like the naxal threat and many of the voters residing in dense and remote areas.
“We have added 57,809 new voters in the list during the SSR (Special Summary Revision) 2022. In the new list, 55% are female and 45% male voters. Around 46.60 percentage area of the district is dense forest which has highly dense Saal tree jungle in Asia. This makes it difficult terrain to carry out the routine development process. In spite of having Naxal affected areas, difficult terrain to reach communities and low literacy rate in some of remote blocks, our officials have enrolled every eligible voters as a result of which the district has shown 6 percent growth in voter’s number,” Mittal, a 2015 Jharkhand cadre IAS officer, who joined the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) at the young age of 25 years, told The Daily Guardian.
According to government officials, continuous monitoring by all concerned officials, regular support to BLOs (Booth Level Officer) and effective implementation of SVEEP (Systematic Voter’s Education and Electoral Participation) program was done to make SSR a success.
“There are 1284 booths in the district. Each booth was closely monitored to ensure form collection, data feeding, and preparing a final voter list. Each BLO was given a specific target. Booths having single-digit or zero number of forms collected were especially focused under the SVEEP program. District administration used google meet to review the progress every day with EROs (Electoral Registration Officers/AEROs (Additional Electoral Registration Officers). Each block was ranked according to a given target and monitored regularly. College students were especially focused by giving suitable instruction to college principals. The Electoral Literacy Club from different colleges did awareness rallies and plays to make voters aware,” explained a government official.
Senior officials including the District Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner and other district-level officials made periodic field visits to ensure smooth execution of the process.
“The BLOs were trained in GARUDA (Global Access to Resource Using Distributed Architecture) application. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has launched the Garuda app for digital mapping of all polling stations, to ensure faster, smarter, transparent and timely completion of election work. The places where there was a network issue, BLOs used to come to headquarters in the network zone twice in a week to complete the data feeding process. Continuous dialogue between different layers of leadership increased the confidence and motivation towards bringing maximum reach to eligible voters,” the official added.
Due to this achievement, Mittal was honoured by the state Cab