Long queues formed in the corridors of the administrative building at Salt Lake on Tuesday for correction of mistakes in voter cards and enrolment of new voters.

What was a routine affair in previous years witnessed unusual rush this time, amid fears over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, National Register of Citizen (NRC) National Population Register.

The queues wound their way from the corridors of the three-storey building in Salt Lake’s DJ block to outside the gates and up to the HSBC office, around 150m away, in the afternoon.

Several residents said they had to wait for at least four hours to reach the counter.

“This year, there has been an unprecedented spurt in the number of people updating and correcting their personal details such as name, age and address. We did not expect such a rush,” said a senior official who has been a part of the electoral verification programme for several years.

Saikat Chakrabarti, the sub-divisional officer of Bidhannagar, said the electoral verification process was being carried out in three Assembly constituencies — Rajarhat-New Town (115), Bidhannagar (116) and Rajarhat-Gopalpur (117). “It was a three-day exercise and many people had come,” Chakrabarti said.

Salt Lake resident Tapasi Das and her husband Surojit wanted to get their address corrected in their voter cards and had to wait for several hours, first outside the building and then in the ground-floor corridor, before they could submit their documents.

“We are moving to Rajarhat and so we wanted the address changed. We came here at 11am. There was a huge crowd and the queue was barely moving. My husband had to call up his office for leave. We finally left the building well after 4pm. We waited for so long because we did not want to have a wrong address,” said Tapasi, who now stays in Salt Lake’s FA block.

Suraj Jain, a resident of New Town, wanted to get his name and age corrected. “If the mistake remains, I might face trouble when the CAA and NRC are implemented,” he said.