The Madras High Court asked Southern Railway (SR) to consider the possibility of granting leave to its employees on case to case basis to vote for the Lok Sabha election on April 19.
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Chennai: The Madras High Court encouraged the Southern Railway (SR) to assess the feasibility of permitting its employees to take leave, on an individual basis, to participate in the Lok Sabha election scheduled for April 19.
During a judicial proceeding on April 10, a bench led by Chief Justice SV Gangapurwala and Justice J Sathya Narayana Prasad chose not to mandate any specific instructions for the Southern Railway management. However, they advised that the railway authorities should give thoughtful consideration to the requests from their employees seeking time off to vote. This deliberation arose from a public interest litigation initiated by V Ram Kumar.
The legal action stemmed from concerns that railway workers in Tamil Nadu were deprived of their opportunity to vote via postal ballots in the impending Lok Sabha elections. This situation occurred because the Southern Railway did not contact the Election Commission of India (ECI) in a timely manner to arrange for postal voting.
In a revelation made to the court on April 10 by Niranjan Rajagopalan, representing the ECI, it was highlighted that the ECI had not received any communication from the Southern Railway regarding the request for postal ballots. The lapse was attributed to the railway’s oversight of directing their request to the Chennai collector instead of the ECI.
According to Rajagopalan, a letter dated February 20 from the secretary to the Principal Chief Personnel Officer of Southern Railway was sent to the Chennai Collector. The letter sought the extension of the postal ballot facility to its employees but failed to make any such request to the ECI. Consequently, while employees of organizations like BSNL, Chennai Metro Rail, Bureau of Civil Aviation Security, and State government had access to postal ballot facilities, Southern Railway employees did not.
The ECI clarified that it was no longer feasible to offer postal ballot options to Southern Railway employees for the upcoming election, as the ballots had already been printed and the deadline for electors to request this voting method had passed on March 25. Additionally, the ECI indicated that the process for casting postal votes had already commenced.
Taking into account these explanations, the court concluded that it could not compel the ECI to fulfill the petitioner’s requests. Nonetheless, it suggested that the Southern Railway might consider granting leave to its employees, evaluating each request on its merits.
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