A Crashing App, A Thousand Forms, And The Workers Who Carried Maharashtra's SIR Drive

S, a 35-year-old Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) worker, begins each morning the same way. She hoists two large bags stuffed with close to a thousand Special Intensive Revision (SIR) forms and walks toward a Bharatiya Janata Party office tucked behind a residential society in Palghar district, roughly two-and-a-half hours by road from Mumbai.

The office is a set-up because the alternative — carrying a thousand sheets of paper from one voter's home to another — is physically impossible.

For each voter she meets, S must fill out two copies of an enumeration form: one for official records, one for the voter. Both copies need signatures. Then she enters the same details a third time, into the Booth Level Officer (BLO) app, a government application built to digitise the Election Commission of India's voter verification drive. After that, she photographs the form and uploads it. The voter's face must be authenticated before submission. 

The process for a single person can take between 45 minutes and an hour, she estimated. On the day DECODE observed her, she completed three forms in three hours.

A BLO verifies electoral rolls for the Election Commission. ASHA workers, however, are community health volunteers, not regular government employees. The SIR is a house-to-house voter verification exercise that has previously been conducted in Bihar and West Bengal. In West Bengal, nearly 27 lakh names were reportedly deleted ahead of the recent Assembly elections.

The app that was supposed to help

The BLO app was developed by Tata Consultancy Services for the Election Commission and is meant to streamline the SIR exercise nationwide. DECODE had reported on an earlier version of the app in December 2025, when users flagged a string of technical problems: frequent crashes, the absence of an autosave feature, and errors thrown by the app's automated verification system.

The latest version works better than its predecessor. But it continues to crash on older phones, and the autosave problem persists.

If a BLO receives a phone call while entering a voter's information, the app can wipe everything they typed, and they must start over.

Face authentication frequently requires multiple attempts. In one instance DECODE observed, S had to scan a voter's face three times before the app registered it. The app's voice-input feature, designed to speed up data entry, routinely mangles Indian names. And while parts of the interface have been translated into Marathi, several fields still require input in English — forcing Marathi-speaking BLOs to pull up Google on their phones and look up spellings mid-form.

A review of the app's listing on the Google Play Store shows other users reporting similar problems.

One form, One Hour

S had returned to work after ten days of sick leave when DECODE met her. She had been an ASHA worker for barely a year and received one day of training before being handed SIR duties.

A large part of her time was consumed not by the app but by everything that precedes it: locating a voter's name in the 2002 electoral roll, digging through stacks for the correct pre-printed form, and explaining the family-mapping process. If a voter's name does not appear in the 2002 roll, the BLO must find names of parents or relatives in that list and manually link them before the enumeration form can even be completed.

The previous day, she had finished six forms.

Twenty minutes away from S's makeshift station, R, a 40-year-old clerk, was seated in the corridor of a government school. Six tables and chairs had been arranged for BLOs, though only four had shown up. The remaining two were teachers who had to finish half a day of classes before reporting for SIR duty.

R had been assigned nearly 1,000 voters and had contacted each of them individually, asking them to come to the school. By 10:30 am, the corridor was packed. DECODE observed multiple arguments as BLOs tried to manage the crowd and explain the process, again and again.

R estimated that entering a completed form into the app should take five to seven minutes. In practice — between finding the right paper form, fixing spelling mismatches, fielding calls, and waiting out server errors — each case was closer to thirty minutes. Some BLOs filled out paper forms during the day and tried to upload them at night from home, but when the server was down, the backlog only grew.

"The BLOs spend more time explaining the process than filling the forms," R said. He used the app's voice-input feature to speed things up, but said it frequently misheard names, forcing manual corrections.

Maharashtra had distributed more than 93% of enumeration forms and digitised nearly 73% of them as of August 3, 2026, according to data released by the Chief Electoral Officer on X. Thane, Mumbai City and Mumbai Suburban lagged behind in forms digitised, with 46.55%, 52.21% and 54.67%, respectively, while Palghar stood at 61.34%.

A new phone, no lunch, and party offices

V, a 50-year-old ASHA worker, said she had to buy a new mobile phone because her older device kept freezing when running the BLO app. She had been assigned 1,124 voters and had roughly 800 forms outstanding. Since the distribution exercise began on June 30, she had managed about 100.

Carrying hundreds of forms every day, V said, was physically exhausting. She argued that BLOs should be given fixed locations where voters could come to them.

K, a 55-year-old teacher, said she and other BLOs had been unable to stop for lunch or sit down for a glass of water for several days. P, a senior clerk, said she had not eaten lunch for two consecutive days. Explaining the SIR process to confused voters over and over, she said, had become mentally draining.

Though the Maharashtra Election Commission has stated that BLOs would visit voters at their homes, S said it was impractical to haul nearly a thousand paper forms door to door. She relied on residential societies to offer her a workspace. When no society space was available, she worked from the corner of a local BJP office, where party workers were also present.

A local corporator — not affiliated with the BJP and who asked not to be named — visited one of the centres where BLOs were working and questioned the arrangement. He said his own party could offer office space to BLOs too, but doing so would invite accusations of political interference. Holding the exercise inside any party office, in his view, created a conflict of interest.

The allegation has surfaced across Maharashtra. Opposition parties have accused the ruling BJP–Shiv Sena–NCP alliance of using party offices as workspaces for BLOs during the SIR exercise.

"Who will teach the class?"

Teachers across the state held demonstrations on July 9, demanding exemption from BLO duties.

Subhash More, working president of Shiksha Bharti, a Maharashtra teachers' association, said teachers had been on election-related duties since April and were also being assigned census work. Schools reopened in June, but teachers were still expected to carry out SIR verification alongside their regular classroom responsibilities.

"In Maharashtra, many divisions have only one teacher. If that teacher goes for SIR work, who will teach the class?" More said.

About 90% of the teachers assigned BLO duties in Mumbai are women, according to More. Many commute from Vasai, Virar, Kalyan, Dombivli, Panvel and Karjat. A teacher on the morning shift might leave home at 5 am, finish classes, and then travel to her assigned SIR location — where she may be responsible for reaching approximately 1,000 voters.

Once a BLO's phone number is printed on the forms and distributed, voters call throughout the day, including during class.

"If a teacher has distributed forms to 300 people, the remaining 700 may still call. The teacher cannot conduct classes because she has to keep answering the phone," More said.

He added that political party workers frequently contacted BLOs and accused them of working too slowly.

More also raised concerns about the lack of basic facilities at the locations where BLOs were asked to work, including the absence of toilets for women — an issue separately raised by women BLOs who spoke to DECODE.

FIRs, withheld salaries, and a teacher in hospital

More alleged that BLOs who failed to report for duty or opposed the exercise had been threatened with police action. He said approximately 70 FIRs had been filed in Mumbai and around 150 BLOs had been threatened with action. DECODE could not independently verify these figures.

More shared a copy of an FIR with DECODE, dated June 6, 2026, registered against nine BLOs in Mumbai's Dahisar area. It alleges that the teachers and non-teaching staff wilfully failed to perform their assigned BLO duties and obstructed the SIR process despite official orders and notices. More said the recruitment and training process for the SIR was already underway in June, and disciplinary action was initiated against teachers who failed to report for training.

He also pointed to the case of a female teacher from Mumbai's Vikhroli who attempted suicide after what he described as sustained pressure related to her BLO duties. The teacher had reportedly been working on election-related duties since April. She later contracted dengue and stopped working temporarily, after which her salary was allegedly withheld in May.

Her husband was subsequently involved in an accident, leaving her to manage the household and care for their two children while working until 8 pm on some days, she said in an interview with Lokmat from the hospital on July 15.

Once her phone number became publicly available as a BLO, she began receiving calls continuously. Political workers also allegedly accused her of not completing enough work, she had claimed in the interview.

More said representatives of the teachers' association visited her in hospital after she was admitted on July 12.

Deadline extended, problems unchanged

The Election Commission has now extended the house-to-house verification deadline in Maharashtra for a second time, giving BLOs until August 17 instead of the earlier extended deadline of August 8. The exercise was originally scheduled to conclude on July 29. The publication of the final electoral roll has also been postponed to October 27.

But the BLOs DECODE spoke to said the rain was only one of many problems, and a relatively minor one at that.

More questioned why teachers and other government workers were expected to use personal phones for official data collection. "If the data is hacked or the phone is damaged, who will be held responsible?" he asked. BLOs had not been provided with dedicated devices, he said, or adequate healthcare protection, or sufficient logistical support.

According to the working president of Shiksha Bharti , BLOs are paid ₹6 per completed form — ₹6,000 for a thousand forms.

More criticised the Election Commission for launching the SIR exercise without a large-scale public awareness campaign. Many voters, he said, did not understand which documents they needed or why the exercise was being conducted at all.

"This work cannot be completed even in six months, but they were asked to finish it by July 29," he said.

The teachers' association has threatened further protests if the state government does not address its concerns. More said it would seek the support of parents, arguing that teachers' absence from classrooms was directly affecting students.

Back in Palghar district, S finishes another form. She packs it into one of her two bags. The forms are only the beginning of the work. Each sheet must be found, explained, filled out twice, signed, authenticated, photographed, and uploaded — often through an app that can erase everything before it is submitted.

She picks up her phone. There are three missed calls from voters.

DECODE emailed TCS and the Maharashtra State Election Commission on July 17, 2026, with questions about the BLO app's technical failures, the use of personal devices for official data collection, and the conditions under which frontline workers were assigned SIR duties. This article will be updated if either responds.

(All BLOs are identified by single-letter pseudonyms at their request.)