The Delhi High Court on Friday questioned the Election Commission of India (ECI) over its decision to deploy school teachers as Booth Level Officers (BLOs) for the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the national capital, asking whether the constitutional powers vested in the poll body under Article 324 permit such action without statutory backing.
The Division Bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia asked the ECI to specify the legal authority under which it had directed school teachers to perform SIR-related duties. It further questioned the poll body whether the authority granted under Article 324 allowed unchecked discretion.
The Court noted that teachers could face disciplinary consequences if they failed to comply with the ECI’s directions. Although the poll body submitted that teachers were required to perform SIR duties only on holidays and outside teaching hours, the Bench questioned why teachers should be deprived of their holidays when other government employees were not similarly required to work.
Observing that the issue required a detailed response, the Court directed the ECI to file an affidavit explaining its stand and listed the matter for further hearing on July 28.
The observations came while hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by advocates Rajesh Kumar Gogna and Ashok Agarwal challenging the deployment of school teachers for electoral roll revision work.
The petitioners argued that the decision had severely disrupted academic activities in government, municipal and aided schools, with regular teachers being pulled out during school hours and classes being handled by guest teachers or educators from unrelated subjects.
They contended that the deployment violated the Supreme Court’s ruling in Election Commission of India v. St. Mary’s School, as well as provisions of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. According to the petition, the ECI had overlooked the availability of a large pool of non-teaching government staff that could instead be requisitioned under Section 159 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
The plea further asserted that SIR duties extend well beyond holidays or non-teaching hours, requiring teachers to attend full-day training programmes, conduct house-to-house verification, undertake data-entry work and participate in prolonged enumeration exercises, resulting in sustained disruption of classroom teaching over several weeks.
The petition also alleged discrimination, claiming that only teachers from government, municipal and government-aided schools had been deployed, while no teachers from private unaided schools were assigned SIR duties. It argued that the burden disproportionately affected students from economically weaker sections, whose education had been disrupted.
Seeking judicial intervention, the petitioners urged the High Court to direct the ECI to limit the requisition of teachers to a maximum of 10 per cent of the regular teaching staff of any school and to first utilise available non-teaching personnel before assigning election-related duties to educators.
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