Rolls delayed, spin on time
ECI pushes Telangana’s Special Intensive Revision by 10 days. Draft rolls now August 10; BLO door-to-door till August 3. Parties have turned it into a booth test — Congress and BRS mobilising; BJP features mainly as an allegation. The fix for a missing name is Form 6, not a rally.
The draft roll is due on August 10; claims and objections follow.
The Election Commission has extended Telangana’s Special Intensive Revision by 10 days — BLO house-to-house visits run till August 3, draft rolls land August 10, claims/objections run August 10–September 9, disposal by October 8, and final rolls on October 12, with October 1 as the qualifying date. The CEO sought more time citing urban lag. According to reports, forms reached almost all of the roughly 3.38 crore electors and 1.85 crore (54.8%) were digitised by July 15, with Hyderabad, Medchal–Malkajgiri and Rangareddy behind the state average.
The CEO has spelt out the ground rules: voters on the June 10 base roll were issued two enumeration forms; only those submitted make the August 10 draft. Missed it? File Form 6 from August 1. He also flagged that BLOs are struggling with addresses in cities and that municipal staff are being roped in — a process problem, not a conspiracy theory.
Politics has arrived anyway. Congress chief minister A. Revanth Reddy convened ministers, MPs and MLAs to drill SIR basics, warn against “negligence”, and told booth agents in Kodangal to complete paperwork for about 55,000 voters before July 30. He went further on stage: alleging the BJP and the BRS have “joined hands” to knock SC, ST, BC, minority and women voters off the rolls — 90% of whom he claimed back Congress. That is his allegation; no data has been produced to show a coordinated BJP–BRS operation or disproportional deletions. The BJP has not bothered to answer it.
The BRS, for its part, told cadre to stay on the doors till August 3, verify the August 10 draft, flag duplicates and help eligible voters who fall off — the actual work that decides whether a voter shows up on paper. AIMIM has publicly told supporters to stay vigilant through the monsoon month because mistakes happen when houses flood and streets don’t.
Two practical facts matter more than anyone’s speech: the draft is on August 10, and absence from it is not the end — Form 6 gets you back in. The rest is theatre until the rolls are published and checked booth by booth. The BJP-led Centre can try a soundbite; the roll will still be printed in Hyderabad, not Delhi.