SIR exercise reaches democracy’s last outpost in Bay of Bengal
Times of India | 12 November 2025
Mousuni Islands (Sundarbans): For this 51 year-old booth level officer, tracking down families to hand over their SIR enumeration forms is a tough task. Ashima Mondal, a schoolteacher, has been tasked to hand over the forms to 943 voters in Bengal's southernmost tip — Mousuni Island's Baliara — where the EPIC addresses of most voters have been swallowed by the advancing Bay of Bengal.
On Monday, she could find only eight voters. Since Nov 4, she has managed to cover only 300 voters, struggling with the agents to track down voters, mostly fishermen, whose official addresses are now under the sea.
Having cycled for nearly one hour from her home, also in Mousuni but more inland, Ashima said: "This is the curse of Mousuni Island. Cyclones Aila (2019) and Amphan (2022) have left this island battered. I have the forms of booth 266.
On the 2002 SIR list, this used to be booth 155. Twenty-three years back, there were 974 voters; now it has dipped to 943. The places which fell under booth 155 are mostly underwater now. The voters have moved on, some inwards to Mousuni and others to the mainland (Namkhana).
"
Mousuni Islands, around 140 km from Kolkata, which has to be reached partly by road and partly on ferries across the Buri Ganga river, is home to around 18,000 voters.
The picturesque island, at the confluence of the river and the sea, has 20 polling booths as per election commission records. Among them, 12 polling booths are right on the seaside, including booth 266. With fishermen abandoning their homes and settling on the dykes – built to slow down the sea's progress towards land – tracking voters based on their earlier addresses is frustratingly slow and mostly hitting a dead end.
TOI accompanied BLO Mondal to Baliara (Indrapalli North booth as per official records) which is believed to be Mousuni Island's southern tip. Sk Saddam, 59, was born here. Now, a grandfather, his family has 14 voters. "In the past decade alone, my family and I had to shift home three times. Every time we update the address (in our EPIC), it gets wiped out by a cyclone. Our booths keep changing, the school where we cast votes has also changed," he said.
Saddam is among the lucky ones in his booth who has got all 14 enumeration forms for him and his family. Nekjaan Biwi, a 55-year-old matriarch, with her six-member family is happy that she finally got all six SIR forms from the BLO. "Our address is non-existent now. Luckily, the BLO happens to know my grandchildren."
Without the help of her two Man Fridays – the two BLAs – it would have been an impossible task, admits Ashima. Trinamool's BLA Sk Mehtab and CPM's BLA Sk Abdul Hamid have been crisscrossing local tea stalls, makeshift markets, and reaching out to all temporary homes that have come on the dykes telling people to collect their forms from Mondal. Mehtab said, "Tracing the voters is the biggest task for us, more than handing over the forms.