By Esha Mitra, CNN
Noida, India (CNN) — A gargantuan task is underway to update the longest voter list in the world. This is India, and that’s nearly a billion people whose details need to be verified before they’re allowed to participate in the world’s largest democracy.
Across the country, tens of thousands of civil servants are rushing to input voter details into a database, by hand. And the deadline is Friday for India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.
The last list dates from 2003 and authorities say it needs cleaning up to reflect mass migration from the countryside to the cities, the accumulation of deceased voters and to remove those on the list illegally.
Twelve states and union territories –– home to some 500 million people –– have been making updates since early November, vetting which voters can participate in the next polls.
Schoolteacher Prem Lata is one of the over 500,000 government employees that have been pulled into the undertaking. Since early November she has been waking up at five in the morning, with her shifts often dragging late into the night. For this work, she and other Booth Level Officers, are paid an extra 1,000 rupees ($11) per month.
“There’s a lot of stress and pressure… and not enough time,” she told CNN at her school outside the capital New Delhi that now is her office.
“We spend all day doing this, and even until 12 or 1 am in the night so of course there’s stress, and my body hurts. It’s a human body after all, not a machine.”
The ordeal isn’t helped by India’s Byzantine bureaucracy.
Since 2003, countless people have moved hundreds of miles for new jobs. Many women have married and taken their husband’s surname. And a large number of people, especially those who are poorer, do not have knowledge of the registration process, nor possess one of the 12 accepted government-issued documents needed for verification.
In India’s rambunctious and frenetic political system, tinkering with the voter list attracts enormous scrutiny, and even litigation.
Critics of the ruling Hindu-nationalist government say it is using the exercise to exclude minorities, something the government denies.
Opposition parties have claimed their local councilors have been wrongly declared dead. Dozens of legal cases have been filed against Booth Level Officers for alleged negligence of duty, and according to data submitted in parliament, there have even been more than a dozen cases of election workers committing suicide under the pressure.
‘Untraceable’
At their school in Noida, a sprawling recent outgrow of the capital New Delhi, Lata and seven other Booth Level Officers are working the phones and chasing down the last names on their lists. Their students sit in the sun coloring in their notebooks –– in school, but effectively on holiday.
“Send me the details on WhatsApp; otherwise, your name will get deleted,” Lata says to someone who hasn’t returned the required forms yet. “Today is the last day, then don’t ask me later why it was cancelled.”
Lata was given 945 voters to verify, of which she has managed to complete 600 so far. “Of the remaining, some have moved, and some are dead, and others are untraceable,” she told CNN.
As well as tardiness, others are simply not convinced they need to cooperate, said Ruby Verma, another Booth Level Officer.
“People say I’m already registered as a voter so why do you need all these details again, they don’t get the verification concept,” she added. “It’s a thankless process.”
India has revised its national voter list eight times since it gained independence from Britain in 1947 and became the world’s biggest democracy.
The last time it did so, in 2