‘EC will summarily remove negligent poll-duty officers’

Kolkata: The Election Commission will summarily remove serving officers found guilty of negligence from poll duty. The EC this time may not wait for a reply from the accused official, deputy election commissioner Sudip Jain indicated during discussions with state officials ahead of the commission’s full bench visit in the third week of January.

“The EC has taken the Bengal assembly polls as a challenge in view of the complaints of violence in the preceding elections,” a senior state election official said. The deputy election commissioner took note of the scale of violence in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and pulled up the state police for keeping the non-bailable warrants (NBW) pending despite EC directives.

Jain, during his meeting with state home secretary H K Diwedi, DG Virendra and ADG (law and order) Gyanwant Singh, asked officials to send law and order reports to the EC on a regular basis.

The deputy election commissioner mentioned that he had reasons to believe that criminals in jail operate during the polls from behind bars. Jain asked all DMs and SPs to get specific information about criminals in jails and send it to the commission within a week.

If these are some steps the EC is mulling to ensure free and fair polls, the panel also plans to walk the extra mile and arrange for postal ballots for voters aged 80 and above and the physically challenged. “There are three categories of people — senior citizens above 80 years, Covid patients or those quarantined and the physically challenged. On the day of notification, field-level officers will go to their houses and give them form 12 D for consent. Later, a poll officer will meet the individual voter and hand over form 13A where the person will give the vote and seal it. The entire process will be videographed,” he said.

The deputy election commissioner, in a meeting with education secretary Manish Jain on Thursday, also took stock of the state of school buildings in Amphan-hit districts because schools will house polling stations.

Jain directed the education secretary to send him a list of Amphan-hit school buildings so that he could expedite the repair process. The EC official also asked health secretary Narayan Swarup Nigam to submit a blueprint of the state’s vaccination programme to the EC. The purpose was to ensure that the vaccination programme didn’t come in the way of poll preparations.