A booth-level officer in West Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district was found hanging outside her home on Wednesday, after which her family alleged that she was overworked due to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state. The officer, Shanti Muni Ekka was given the responsibility to distribute enumeration forms in a booth area, but she could not speak, read or write Bengali, which made her task difficult.

West Bengal was among 12 states and Union Territories where the Election Commission began the enumeration phase of the exercise on November 4.

After Ekka’s death, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee claimed that she “took her own life under the unbearable pressure of the ongoing SIR work”. She alleged that many lives are being lost due to “the unplanned, relentless workload” imposed by the poll panel.

On Sunday as well, two booth level officers in Kerala and Rajasthan died by suicide because of alleged work pressure linked to the revision of voter rolls. More on Scroll.

The Supreme Court urged the Commission for Air Quality Management to consider directing schools in Delhi and the broader National Capital Region to shift sports activities scheduled for November and December to “safer and less susceptible months”. Amicus curiae Aparajita Singh highlighted that “holding sports now is like putting them [children] in gas chambers”.

The court also ordered that matters pertaining to air pollution in the capital be heard on a monthly basis, so as to monitor the measures being taken by the authorities.

The city has recorded air quality in the “poor” or worse categories since mid-October, leading to the imposition of Stage 3 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan, or GRAP, on November 11. Read more.

Activist Jyoti Jagtap, one of those accused of involvement in the 2018 Bhima Koregaon case, has been granted interim bail by the Supreme Court. A bench of Justices MM Sundresh and Satish Chandra Sharma passed the order after it was told that she had been in custody for over five years.

Jagtap, a member of cultural organisation Kabir Kala Manch, has been in prison since September 8, 2020. The National Investigation Agency has alleged that the organisation, which was formed after the 2002 Gujarat riots, was a frontal organisation of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).

The case is related to the violence that broke out in Bhima Koregaon village near Pune on January 1, 2018, a day after the Elgar Parishad conclave was organised to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle of Bhima Koregaon. Jagtap is accused of singing and chanting provocative slogans at the event along with other members of the Kabir Kala Manch.

Seven years on, the trial in the case is yet to begin. Read more.

Press bodies have expressed concern about the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025, contending that the “ambiguous obligations” under them could open the door for indirect censorship. The Union government notified the rules on Friday, bringing into effect the Digital Personal Data Protection Act passed in 2023.

With this, the provision that amends the Right to Information Act – to bar the disclosure of personal information about public officials even when such disclosure may serve a larger public interest – also came into effect.

The Editors Guild of India said that the Rules “continue to leave critical questions unresolved” for journalists and media organisations. Digipub News India Foundation, an association of independent digital news organisations and journalists of which Scroll is a member, echoed the concerns. Read on.

Also Read: Why the draft personal data protection rules are contentious

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