Can you do whatever you like? Delhi High Court questions ECI on deployment of teachers for SIR duty

The Delhi High Court on Friday questioned the Election Commission of India (ECI) for deploying school teachers for duty related to special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the national capital.

A Bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia asked whether the ECI can do whatever it pleases by taking recourse to Article 324 of the Constitution. Article 324 confers the ECI with powers of superintendence, direction, and control of elections for parliament and State legislatures.

"Taking shade of Article 324, you do whatever you like?" the Bench asked.

The Court further asked the poll body under which authority it was directing school teachers to work in SIR.

It noted that ECI can punish teachers who do not work.

Advocate Sanjay Vashishtha appeared for the ECI and argued that the SIR process in Delhi is almost over and that only 10-14% of the school teachers are eventually called upon to work in electoral roll revision duties.

Vashishtha added that ECI's power to engage the staff flows from Section 13B(2) of the Representation of People Act and the power is exercised liberally to avoid any inconvenience.

However, the Court observed that while the ECI refers to personnel as "volunteers", they have no choice in accepting SIR duties.

"Make a statement that this is voluntary, and we will dispose of the petition," the Court stated.

While ECI said that teachers are required only to work on holidays and non-teaching hours, the Court asked why teachers are not entitled to their holidays as any regular government employee and why they should work as booth level officers (BLOs) on holidays.

"Somebody is not interested in your honorarium or compensation. Can these instructions issued by you be said to be mandatory? Can you say no, no, no, we are compensating, please come. Destroy their holidays? Don't they need rest?" the Bench demanded.

The Court eventually directed the ECI to file an affidavit explaining its stand and posted the case for further consideration on July 28.

The Court was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) petition filed by advocates Rajesh Kumar Gogna and Ashok Agarwal challenging the ECI decision to requisition services of teachers for SIR duty.

It was submitted that in several schools, the entire regular faculty was withdrawn during teaching hours and classes were left to guest teachers or to teachers of unrelated subjects.

Such burden has fallen exclusively on the schools of the poor while private unaided schools remain untouched, it was alleged.

"The deployment is contrary to the law declared in Election Commission of India v. St. Mary's School, violates section 27 read with Sections 25-26 of the RTE Act, 2009, and ignores the vast pool of non-teaching staff of the authorities amenable to requisition under Section 159 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951," it was stated.

SIR duty is not confined to holidays or non-teaching hours and teachers have to attend full-day training sessions, undertake house-to-house enumeration during school hours, and perform data-entry and verification work over extended periods, it was pointed out.

The disruption in their school work is therefore continuous and spread over weeks, not confined to a single polling day, the petition pointed out.

Pertinently, the plea alleged that the requisition of teachers was discriminatory because teachers were being withdrawn from government schools, municipal schools and government aided schools but not a single teacher has been requisitioned from any private unaided school.

"The students of government, municipal and aided 15 schools belong overwhelmingly to the lower middle class and the poor sections of society; it is their education alone that has been brought to a standstill," the plea contended.

A vast pool of staff, other than school teachers, exists in Delhi but ECI has made no attempts to quantify or exhaust them before turning to school teachers, the petitioners said.

Hence, the petition said that directions should be issued to cap the requisition of school teachers at 10 percent of the regular teachers of any school.