Didir Doot: TMC's litmus test, party ties voter list performance to KMC poll tickets
Telegraph | 26 November 2025
The performance of councillors during the current special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls will be taken into account while distributing tickets for the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) elections scheduled for next year, said senior leaders of the Trinamool Congress during a meeting with councillors and party workers on Tuesday.
There was also a strong message to get over internal feuds.
Infighting between councillors and ward presidents will not be tolerated. They must resolve their differences, some of those who attended the meeting quoted the leaders as saying.
Tuesday’s meetings, held separately with councillors from wards covering the north and south Calcutta parliamentary constituencies, follow an online meeting by the Trinamool’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee on Monday.
At Monday’s meeting, Banerjee warned leaders that any laxity in the remaining SIR process in poll-bound Bengal would not be taken well.
The councillors were also asked to speed up entries in the Didir Doot app.
“The party wants the names of all existing voters in its app. This will give us instant data and help us identify whether any original voter’s name was deleted from the list. Councillors were asked to ensure no names are missing in the app. The party leaders said councillors who do not work hard to enlist the name of voters will not get tickets in next year’s KMC elections,” said a councillor.
“They were also asked to work together with booth-level agents who are working very hard. A councillor should not only boss over a BLA but assist them and work as hard,” the councillor added.
The party has already trained its booth-level agents (BLAs) to use the app designed to record voter data in Bengal.
Once a BLA logs in to the app on the phone, the entire voter list for the area assigned to them will be displayed. The BLAs have to mark whether a voter was present during the process, had shifted elsewhere or had passed away.
“In many places, the BLAs are not making entries in the app. If they do not make the entries, the party won’t have the updated voter information. Hence the stress on making the entries,” said a councillor, who attended the meetings on Monday and Tuesday.
“At Monday’s meeting, Abhishek Banerjee expressed displeasure at the low rate of entries in the app. He mentioned Entally, Ballygunge and Port as three Assembly constituencies where the entries have been quite low,” a councillor said.
The meeting with councillors from south Calcutta was held at Terapanth Bhavan at Puddapukur, while the meeting with councillors from north Calcutta was held at Mohit Mancha in Paikpara.
Calcutta’s mayor Firhad Hakim, state youth affairs minister Aroop Biswas and Rajya Sabha MP Subrata Bakshi were among the leaders who spoke at the closed-door meetings.
A party leader said the party brass believed that if the workers and leaders worked hard during the SIR, it would help them in the long run.
“This will be the first scrutiny of voters before next year’s Assembly elections. Councillors and ward-level workers will know every household and how many voters each household has,” he said.