50-year-old Gujarat BLO dies, family alleges work pressure

He was working as a BLO for the last two weeks. Parmar’s family alleged that he had “excessive workload” due to the BLO work.

The Education Department said it is looking into the death of the school principal and that officials will visit the family.
A senior police official of Kheda district told The Indian Express that Parmar had a “natural death” and there was no probe initiated into the death as there had been no formal complaint from the family or the education department.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Parmar’s daughter Shilpa said that her father was “stressed” due to the BLO duty.

“My father had worked till late night to complete the entries on the electoral roll on Wednesday and did not wake up in the morning. For two weeks, he had been stressed due to the workload of the SIR as it required going about the task without break all day. He had returned home at his usual time of about 7 pm and then had tea in a hurry. He had not eaten all day due to work. He then rushed to my uncle’s place in another village to complete the data entry of the electoral roll… He had returned close to midnight and gone to bed. But he never woke up,” Shilpa said.

Shilpa added that his father used to travel about 90 kilometers by motorcycle every day to his school in Navapura and back from Jambudi.

The family said that he was under stress due to the deadline pressure in BLO work. “There is some issue with the mobile network in our house and so he decided to go to my uncle’s place to make the data entry for the day… The exhaustion due to the extra workload took his life…” she said.

Kheda Paresh Vaghela, District Primary Education Officer (DPEO), told The Indian Express: “We also came to know through news reports that the teacher who was working as the BLO died of a heart attack. We have not received any formal complaint from the family about the excessive work pressure due to the BLO duty. As per the preliminary investigations, we have learnt that there is no postmortem report of the deceased as of yet. Still, the TPEO (Taluka Primary Education Officer) has been asked to look into the case and conduct an inquiry. Authorities will visit the family.”

Nearly 50,963 BLOs are working across the state for mapping 5.08 crore voters as a part of the SIR which was launched on November 4. Most of the BLOs in the state are school teachers.

Recently, several teacher bodies had objected to the additional work of BLO given to teachers. Calling the practice of issuing an arrest warrant for teachers missing the BLO work a ‘slavery practice’, the Akhil Bhartiya Rashtriya Shaikshik Mahasangh Gujarat, in a representation submitted to the state government, had also urged to stop issuing arrest warrants and ‘preserve the respect of teachers in the society’.

The Congress has also been criticising the deployment of teachers as BLOs. Citing the recent Parakh Survey report, Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee spokesperson Manish Doshi said that on one hand, the level of education in Gujarat has deteriorated as the state ‘is among the bottom 10 states’; on the other hand, 90 per cent of the BLO work in Gujarat has been assigned to teachers. “If they have to work for SIR after school, how much attention can those teachers give to the school? How will the level of education improve, or is education not a priority?” Doshi questioned.

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