SIR: Civil society groups to conduct social audit in Kodagu on September 29 over deletions

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Officials verifying details during a public hearing as part of the Special Intensive Revision at Malleshwaram in Bengaluru on Thursday. | Photo Credit: SUDHAKARA JAIN

Civil society groups, including Eddelu Karnataka, will conduct a social audit of the draft electoral roll in Kodagu on September 29. Members of the groups will read out the draft roll and the Absent, Shifted, Duplicate, Dead, and Others (ASDDO) list to compare the entries with the pre-SIR polling-station-wise electoral roll. The groups will present the findings of the social audit to Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar on September 30. 

The comparison, the groups said, is aimed at establishing how many people who continue to live at the same address have been wrongly marked for deletion under the ASDDO list, and how many people continue to live in the area but did not receive enumeration forms.

The groups had earlier conducted training and a pilot survey in H.D. Kote taluk before the SIR started. During the survey, around 1,441 families were visited. Using the original and revised electoral rolls, village heads, gram panchayat members, local leaders and anganwadi workers went door-to-door and verified the names of more than 5,000 voters with household heads or members. The teams identified people who needed to be added to or removed from the roll and noted corrections relating to names, addresses, dates of birth and other details. The necessary forms, such as Form 6 for inclusion and Form 8 for corrections, were also filled out for such cases.

The groups said Kodagu’s terrain had posed accessibility challenges for Booth Level Officers (BLOs) during the mapping and distribution of enumeration forms. Several areas could not be reached even by two-wheelers and had to be accessed on foot, they said. Civil society groups argued that people living in such areas may have been left out of the SIR process.

The groups also said that the tribal population in the region faced difficulties in producing documents. Many tribal workers, including bonded labourers, do not have access to their own documents, with Aadhaar cards and other documents being kept by contractors in some cases. Frequent migration and shifting residences for work have also made it difficult for some people to produce proof of residence, they said.

While civil society groups have raised concerns over the possibility of gaps caused by migration and difficult terrain, Kodagu, as per official data, had recorded the highest mapping rate before the SIR began (over 98%). At the same time, more than 8% of the electorate was marked under the ASDDO categories and subsequently deleted.

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