The Booth Level Officers visiting every household to distribute enumeration forms, as part of the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral roll, in Bengaluru on Tuesday.
| Photo Credit: SUDHAKARA JAIN
While the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has already begun in the State, government employees, particularly those from the Education Department besides others, who have been roped in as Booth Level Officers (BLOs), will still have to report to their workplaces to mark their attendance, as the AI-powered Kartavya app, officially known as the Karnataka Advanced Attendance Management System (KAAMS), requires employees to take a selfie to mark attendance strictly within a 100- to 150-metre radius of their designated workplace.Even Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) V. Anbu Kumar had written to the Chief Secretary in this regard. However, no response has been received even as the exercise has begun.CEO’S letterRequesting all Heads of Departments to temporarily exempt staff deployed for the SIR from daily biometric attendance and attendance through the Kartavya Attendance App during the period of the exercise, the CEO, in a letter dated June 22, stated, “Their [BLOs’] attendance during the SIR be considered based on certificates issued by the Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) concerned, instead of daily biometric or app-based attendance.” A total of 59,050 BLOs have been trained and deployed across Karnataka for the exercise.Explaining the challenges, a BLO from the Education Department said that the ‘check-in’ on the app has to be done from the workplace at 10 a.m., and the ‘check-out’ must also be done from the same location. “This means that we, who have been roped in as the BLOs, must first go to our workplace, even if our assigned polling area is elsewhere, then carry out the door-to-door enumeration, and finally return to the workplace to check out,” the BLO said.Twice a dayStarting academic year 2026-27, the government had mandated all government employees including teaching and non-teaching staff to register attendance twice a day on the app from the place where they are on duty. The app uses Aadhaar-based eKYC, facial recognition and GIS-based geofencing, with liveness detection to prevent photo spoofing.The BLOs said they should be relieved of one of the two responsibilities. Otherwise, they would either fail to meet their enumeration targets or lose attendance and fall behind on their routine work.Only 1 GB data limitSpeaking to The Hindu, the BLOs complained about poor network connectivity and the 1 GB daily mobile data limit allocated to them, stating that the field verification carried out as part of the exercise is “highly data-intensive”.“We are required to upload scanned pages of Enumeration Forms (EFs), take high-resolution live photographs of electors, and coordinate real-time data synchronisation. The daily 1 GB data limit is inadequate and was not sufficient during the mapping phase alone, let alone enumeration phase, where the work is more,” a BLO said. Published - June 30, 2026 10:20 pm IST
