New Delhi: Electoral forms, identity cards and voter records have all but edged out textbooks and worksheets at a Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) school in Tughlaqabad, with its teachers having to split their time between taking lessons and conducting the ongoing SIR verification exercise.As locals queued up inside classrooms of Nigam Pratibha Vidyalaya in Harkesh Nagar Thursday afternoon to get errors in their poll records corrected, TOI saw students continue with their studies even as teachers appeared stressed while juggling both responsibilities.Two officials were seen handling the locals and their forms in Room No. 3, which appeared to have been turned into a makeshift verification space. Books and other stationary items were still stacked inside, while a small setup for brewing tea was visible in one corner.Locals arriving at the room had largely the same set of complaints — spelling mistakes in names, surnames not matching those in their documents, differences in age or date of birth and incorrect family details in the electoral records. Several said what appeared to be minor discrepancies were making them visit different centres or return multiple times to this one.Many of them, including several daily-wage earners, said repeated trips to camps and electoral offices were affecting their livelihoods and costing them their daily earnings.Murli Choudhary, 41, a vegetable seller, said he had been visiting one centre after another for the past three days to get a simple spelling correction in his name done. “I have two children and I need to earn every day. I can manage if I lose out on a day’s work, but I cannot afford to lose three days,” he said, adding that the frustration had reached a point that he would rather have his name removed from the electoral rolls than keep making repeated trips to these centres.Savitri Devi, a resident of Okhla Phase-1, said she had already visited a centre in Lajpat Nagar four times over a discrepancy in her age and was again trying her luck in this one.Several others echoed similar concerns, saying anomalies involving names, spellings, ages and missing family members from the 2002 electoral rolls were forcing them to make two or three rounds of different centres. For them, each additional visit came at a direct cost.Some, like Choudhary, said they were so frustrated that they were willing to give up their voting rights rather than repeatedly compromise their work to get the discrepancies corrected.The residents are not the only ones to feel the heat. Teachers at the school said they were struggling to balance two demanding responsibilities. Their day begins at 6am, followed by regular school work and classes, after which they are expected to cater to locals visiting the school for SIR-related verification.“How can we manage both? If there is pressure from both ends, we cannot do justice to either,” a teacher said, on condition of anonymity, adding that they had been doing the additional work for around three months. Another teacher said he was feeling the pressure of juggling SIR-related work and daily duties towards students.Yet some other teachers, struggling to manage both responsibilities, have brought the electoral verification work into their classrooms. In one such classroom, TOI saw some students studying and others playing even as their teacher attended to the locals, checking their documents and clearing their doubts related to electoral records.MCD and Delhi poll officials didn’t respond to queries regarding the issue till the time of going to press.
