- Thursday, April 18, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
AROUND 200 contract employees have been retrenched allegedly over a poll-roll fraudulence which had put the Election Commission of India into the back foot ahead of the Kerala state election in April.
According to a report by Kerala’s Onmanorama, the retrenched data-entry operators, who were appointed through the state electronics development corporation limited to handle the details of the electorate, were based in the office of the chief electoral officer in the state capital of Thiruvananthapuram, 14 district collectorates and taluk offices under them.
The allegations go that the data-entry operators were retrenched over allegations that they had leaked the voters’ list to the opposition. Teeka Ram Meena, the chief electoral officer, has contacted the director general of police seeking a probe into the matter, the report added.
Opposition leader alleged presence of bogus voters in electoral roll
Ahead of the election on April 6 that the alliance led by the Left won to return to power in the state for the second successive time, opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala alleged that the electoral roll saw the inclusion of 4.34 lakh (0.434 million) bogus voters. The Indian National Congress leader then went on to produce documents to supplement the charge.
The election commission sought an investigation after the opposition’s ‘Operation Twins’ (mission to unearth bogus voters) claimed widespread irregularities in the voters’ list.
The electoral body carried out a quick probe over a few days just ahead of the election and found more than 38,000 names to have been duplicated in the list, the report said. After counting the votes, the election commission asked the chief electoral officer to probe the leak of the poll roll, it added.
The chief electoral officer thereafter wrote to the police on the basis of this directive and the contract workers were consequently retrenched. The workers though have alleged that sacking them saying the list had been leaked was not right. They said the list was already available on the commission’s website and provided to the political parties also along with the voters’ photographs.
