Suspension Over Electoral Duties Drives Fatehpur Clerk to Suicide Before Marriage
Fatehpur official dies after SIR meeting absence.
In a devastating incident that has shaken Fatehpur district, 25-year-old government clerk Sudhir Kumar was found hanging at his residence on Tuesday morning, just 24 hours before his scheduled wedding, after being suspended for missing a compulsory meeting linked to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
According to a written complaint filed by Kumar’s sister, the young clerk had been excused from attending Sunday’s official meeting due to urgent wedding preparations, but was nonetheless placed under suspension, with an officer allegedly arriving at their home on Tuesday morning to formally deliver the punitive order, plunging him into acute mental distress.
The sister stated that since the suspension notice, Sudhir had been deeply disturbed and unable to cope with what she described as sustained harassment by senior officials, culminating in the fatal act that has left a bride-to-be widowed before marriage and cast a pall of grief over the entire community.
The tragedy comes amid mounting national concern over the intense pressure on thousands of government employees and teachers drafted as Booth Level Officers for the Election Commission’s nationwide SIR exercise ahead of the December 4 deadline, with several reported deaths across states now being attributed to extreme work-related stress.
Similar cases have emerged in recent days: a female BLO in West Bengal’s Nadia district was found hanging on Saturday, with family members citing overwhelming SIR workload; two teachers in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen and Damoh districts died suddenly on Friday while performing electoral duties, highlighting a disturbing pattern that has prompted demands for urgent intervention to protect frontline personnel from excessive administrative coercion.
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