The BJP has posted one second-level assessor each in 42 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state for the party’s ongoing booth-strengthening initiative.

The state unit of the BJP took the move at the directive of the central leadership which spotted multiple discrepancies in reports on the progress of the initiative received from districts.

Each of the second-level assessors has been assigned one Lok Sabha constituency, where they will spend four days, addressing the anomalies in the execution of the booth sashaktikaran (strengthening) programme and preparing reports.

All the 42 reports will be presented to national and Bengal leaders at the state executive meeting to be held at the National Library in Calcutta on May 20.

“If we find a district or booth-level leader inefficient, we have been given a free hand to replace that person immediately,” said one of the 42 second-level assessors.

“Our leaders had to come up with this idea because most districts were feeding them inflated figures of booth sashaktikaran. At many places, little work was being done but the concurrent reports claimed immense success of the exercise,” this person said.

He added that although the booth strengthening exercise was being carried out nationally, the necessity to set up a second level of scrutiny had cropped up only in Bengal.

BJP’s Bengal minder Sunil Bansal and Mangal Pandey are the brains behind this initiative, this person said.

One of the tasks assigned to the district leaders was to reach out to about 150 families in their areas and highlight the achievements of the Narendra Modi government. A 17-point charter was prepared for the campaign. At the end of the exercise, one phone number from each family was to be collected to prepare a report that was sent to Delhi.

While reviewing these lists, it was found that most of these phone numbers were never contacted. Naturally, the basic goal of the initiative, to woo voters in the name of Modi, remained unfulfilled.

The central leadership doubted that the false reporting could also imply that the party’s drive to set up committees at all 77,000-odd booths across the state had not been successful as expected.

“Reaching out to 150 families was to be done through the newly set up network of booth committees. If the task has not been completed, it might mean that not enough people could be inducted into these committees,” a source said.

“It basically proves that our party’s initiative to strengthen its organisation at the grassroots has ended up in a futile exercise,” he added.

Amid reports of such half-baked execution of the booth-strengthening programme, Bansal and Pandey found the need to reassess the progress of the initiative in the state.

Calls to the BJP’s state unit chief Sukanta Majumdar, seeking a comment on this development, went unanswered.