Following The News Minute’s investigation into a massive voter data theft in Bengaluru, the city police have filed two FIRs against a field worker deployed by a private NGO, which covertly collected personal data from voters by making field workers impersonate government officials. The NGO itself is only named in one FIR, however no action has been taken against the organisation so far and not one trustee has been named in the FIR.
While the Chilume Educational, Cultural and Rural Development Institute seems to be facing little action, a young man named Lokesh who was employed through a sub-contractor with false promises is being investigated and might face arrest for executing the massive operation in the city collecting sensitive voter data from citizens.
TNM has independently spoken to many young men who were involved in the covert operation in the last three months. The young men, hailing from small towns and villages in different parts of the state, told us that they were lured with the promises of salaries between Rs 15,000 and Rs 25,000 per month, depending on how much data they collected. They were unaware that they would be made to impersonate government officials, and say they believed they were part of a legitimate activity approved by the government.
Many of them quit the job over unpaid wages and complained of horrible working conditions while carrying out the field work. “We came here in August and we were trained in the Chilume office and sent out to do voter and mapping surveys. But we were not paid our promised salaries even though we had been working for two months,” a 27-year-old man from Haveri who had joined as a field worker told TNM. “We were hired through a sub-contractor who promised to cover the rent of the PG we were staying in, but even that was not paid,” said the worker.
A 19-year-old who had come from Kolar said that he was promised Rs 15,000 per month but was not given any amount.
Several field workers who were lodged in a paying guest accommodation in Mahadevapura zone told TNM that the vendor who had contracted them to Chilume did not pay the rent to the PG. The PG owner confirmed this and added that when they demanded the rent, the vendor created a ruckus, which was caught on their CCTV cameras.
As they unknowingly carried out the illegal activity, the workers said they were left to fend for themselves on the field when they faced the ire of residents who got suspicious of their stated credentials. In two neighbourhoods, in Kodigehalli and Garudacharpalya in the city, workers said that they were chased away when they approached residents for information “We were asked by the vendor to convince the residents through our interpersonal skills that this was an official exercise being carried out in the entire booth. We even carried a photocopy of the BBMP order giving permission to Chilume,” a worker stated.
Importantly, this order only allowed Chilume to conduct SVEEP (Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation), a special voter awareness drive by the Election Commission to revise the electoral rolls.
The field workers we spoke to said that they carried out a voter survey by impersonating booth level officers (BLO). “We wore BBMP ID cards and carried out a voter survey covering 36 polling booths. We collected details like name, phone number, voter ID, Aadhaar number, caste, religion, marital status, employment and addresses from the houses we visited. We uploaded them to a mobile app called Digital Sameeksha,” a worker told TNM.
BLOs are grassroots election representatives who are tasked with voter verification work months before elections.
Another worker said that he was asked to draw detailed maps of the areas that fall under a particular polling booth. “We marked out each individual unit based on whether it was a commercial or residential property, and whether it was vacant or occupied, and filled a booklet with this information,” said the worker. The maps, which have been sourced by TNM, showed the areas they had surveyed and had been marked out in incredible detail.
The order was issued on August 20 but going beyond its brief, the NGO illegally signed sub-contracts with other agencies and employed hundreds of field workers to collect voter data. The field workers made voters share personal information such as their Aadhaar number, voter ID number, phone number and address. Following TNM’s investigation, the Government Order was cancelled by the BBMP, which also released a note to citizens asking them not to share information with Chilume.
Watch the field workers in conversation with TNM