‘Supercentenarians' puzzle EC;124-year-old turns out to be 35
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Patna: Bihar's ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has produced a mix of bafflement, amusement and embarrassment — from confirmed cases of voters aged well over a century to a clerical blunder that turned a 35-year-old into a supposed 124-year-old icon of political protest.
According to the
Election Commission
, officials engaged in the SIR drive recently identified two women electors who are 120 and 119 years old, living in Bhagalpur and Gopalganj districts respectively. In Bhagalpur's Pirpainti assembly constituency, 120-year-old Asha Devi was found "alive, with wrinkles all over her face" after initial doubts about her age. Deputy election officials ordered a verification, during which BLO Farzana Khatoon checked her Aadhaar card and spoke to villagers.
"During the inquiry, Asha Devi was found alive, and her age is 120," Khatoon wrote in her report.
Similarly, in Gopalganj's Barauli constituency, 119-year-old Manturia Devi's age was confirmed through physical verification in the presence of the BLO and an observer. The assistant electoral registration officer stated in his letter that her reported age "was found correct".
Interestingly, Ethel Caterham, a 115-year-old British woman, currently holds the title of the world's oldest living person.
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But if these centenarians are challenging Japan's life expectancy records, another case in Siwan has turned into a comedy of errors. Minta Devi of Daraundha constituency, celebrated by opposition MPs as a "124-year-old voter" during their "vote-chori" protest in Parliament, is in fact just 35. Her apparent longevity was the result of a voter ID slip that recorded her birth year as 1900 instead of 1990.
"This is purely the fault of the Election Commission," she told a television news channel.
"My year of birth is 1990 and I submitted the documents online, but now everyone is asking about my age." She admitted she had not checked her card when it arrived. "When the controversy broke out, I took out the card and found '15-07-1900' printed as my date of birth," she said. Her husband's name had even been placed in the 'house number' field.
Siwan DM Aditya Prakash called it a "typographical error" caused when "she cited 1990 as her year of birth and this changed to 1900 due to a typo error by the computer operator". The correction, he said, "will be done within a week". Deputy election officer Sohail Ahmad confirmed she had applied through Form 6 and assured the error "will be disposed of within the stipulated time."
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