Moradabad BLO Dies by Suicide, Cites “Unbearable” SIR Workload in Video and Note
Teacher ends life in Moradabad, blames impossible voter revision targets.
In a deeply distressing incident, 46-year-old schoolteacher and Booth-Level Officer Ravindra Kumar Singh hanged himself at his Moradabad home in the early hours of Sunday, explicitly blaming the “unbearable pressure” of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in a pre-recorded video and a two-page handwritten suicide note.
The video, now circulating widely, shows a sobbing Singh seated on the floor, repeatedly saying he had been working round-the-clock without rest yet was falling hopelessly behind on daily SIR targets. In the note addressed to the district Basic Education Officer, he wrote that anxiety had robbed him of sleep for weeks, leaving him with only two to three hours nightly while he worried about his four daughters, two of whom are seriously ill, and begged his family for forgiveness.
His wife Babli Devi discovered his body in the storage room and immediately alerted police. Senior Superintendent of Police Ashish Pratap Singh confirmed that both the note and video cite only the crushing workload of BLO duties, with no other reason mentioned for the suicide.
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The death marks another grim addition to a disturbing pattern, with more than a dozen BLO reportedly taking their lives across Uttar Pradesh and other states in recent weeks, all pointing to the same relentless cycle of door-to-door verification, data entry, and constant reporting demands imposed during the ongoing nationwide SIR exercise covering twelve states.
Hours after the tragedy became public, the Election Commission announced a one-week extension of the SIR timeline and granted BLOs and Booth-Level Agents seven additional days to submit lists of absent, shifted, deceased, and duplicate voters. District Magistrate Anuj Kumar Singh described the deceased teacher’s work as “excellent,” assured full assistance to the bereaved family, and ordered simultaneous administrative and police probes into the circumstances that drove Ravindra Kumar Singh to this desperate step.
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