Bengaluru: Tens of VIPs in Bengaluru, including Kannada movie star Shivarajkumar who had received notices in the no-mapping category under special intensive revision of electoral rolls, didn’t have to go to GBA office with a clutch of documents to set right logical discrepancies. Instead, SIR officers carried out the verification exercise at their homes.The VIP list which enjoyed this privilege included judges, MPs and MLAs, other senior politicians, bureaucrats, achievers in sports, cinema and other fields.Pommala Sunil Kumar, additional district election officer, Bengaluru North, said: “We’ve a provision to complete the process for VIPs without their appearance at the hearing. The BLO concerned will complete the process at their doorstep,” Kumar said.Sources said actor Shivarajkumar’s family had stayed at Manyata Tech Park and was registered to vote at a booth in Rachenahalli. Since his name did not figure in the 2002 SIR electoral roll, it could not be mapped to the earlier roll, and the system automatically generated a notice asking him to appear for a hearing.Once officials identified the voter as the actor, they decided against issuing him a notice. Instead, they chose to collect the required documents and complete verification without his personal appearance.Other VIPs, too, were asked not to come to the BBMP offices. BLOs processed their notices at their homes.Voters facing health issues also skip office visitBengaluru: Not just VIPs, even voters with age or health issues were able to complete the process at home as BLOs and AEROs visited them for the verification exercise.Booth-level officer Faiza Begum of RK Hegde Nagar in north Bengaluru went to the residence of an 82-year-old voter at Bharatiya City on Tuesday to complete the hearing process.In another case, AERO MB Prakash and his team walked out to a car parked outside a community hall in RK Hegde Nagar, where an accident victim unable to walk was waiting.“A 35-year-old woman had suffered a fracture in an accident recently. She came to the hearing venue in a car, and when the staff learnt that she could not walk, they went to her vehicle and completed the hearing process,” an officer said.Most voters who turned up for SIR hearings in Bengaluru said they were satisfied with how officials handled the process and the arrangements at the venues. Officials said a majority who received notices produced valid documents for verification, while only a few could not — in those cases, staff considered their claims based on declaration forms issued by BLOs.
