SIR to begin in Telangana from June 15

Hyderabad: Telangana Chief Electoral Officer C Sudharshan Reddy on Saturday said the SIR of electoral rolls would be conducted in the state from June 15.

He said preparation of the electoral roll would begin from June 15 to 24, while house-to-house verification would be taken up from June 25 to July 24.

During the verification process, as many as 35,000 Booth Level Officers (BLOs) would be deployed across the state. The BLOs would visit residences and hand over the enumeration forms. They would later collect the filled-out forms, he told reporters here.

Later, draft notification (of electoral rolls) would be issued and claims and objections would be accepted from July 31 to August 30.

The final electoral roll would be published on October 1.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was last implemented in undivided Andhra Pradesh in 2002.

The initiative aims to sanitise the voters' lists by correcting the existing errors and addressing grievances raised by various political parties, Reddy said.

"The main idea of SIR is that no eligible citizen should be left out and no ineligible elector should be included (in the voters' lists)," he said.

After the draft publication of the electoral rolls, rationalisation of polling stations would be carried out.

As of now, there are 35,000 polling stations with 3.40 crore voters, he said.

The CEO said meetings were held with political parties thrice. The parties were urged to appoint Booth Level Agents (BLAs).

The BLAs would help the BLOs in identification of voters and houses. Many parties have appointed BLAs, he added.

Asked about the ruling Congress' demand for conducting the SIR for about 1.5 years to two years, he said the process would be carried out in three-four months as per the guidelines of the Election Commission and additional time can be sought as per requirement.