The railway employees in Tamil Nadu have lost their right to cast votes through postal ballots during this year’s Lok Sabha polls because Southern Railway had made a request for extending the facility of postal ballot wrongly to Chennai Collector instead of sending the communication to Chief Electoral Officer (CEO).
Appearing before Chief Justice Sanjay V. Gangapurwala and Justice J. Sathya Narayana Prasad, ECI counsel Niranjan Rajagopalan said, the CEO had written to various central government organisations on February 5 and wanted to know whether their employees should be extended with the postal ballot facility.
The letter was sent to the General Manager of Southern Railway too insisting upon a reply on or before February 10, 2024. Since there was no response, the CEO sent a reminder on February 16, 2024 asking Southern Railway and a few other entities to respond to his .communication on or before February 20, 2024.
Yet, there was no response from Southern Railway to the reminder too, the counsel said. The submissions were made during the hearing of a public interest litigation petition filed by railway employee V. Ramkumar of Madurai against the denial of postal ballot facility despite railways being an essential service.
Mr. Rajagopalan told the court that from the documents submitted by the Southern Railways in the court, it appeared that the secretary to the Principal Chief Personnel Officer of Southern Railway had written to the Chennai Collector on February 20 requesting the extension of postal ballot facility.
Since that communication had not reached the CEO, the facility was extended only to employees of organisations such as Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), Chennai Metro Rail Limited, Bureau of Civil Aviation Security, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the State government employees, he said.
The counsel said it would not be possible to extend the facility to railway employees now since the postal ballots had already been printed and the last date for individual electors to submit their requisition too had expired on March 25. Further, the process of casting postal votes had already begun.
After recording his submissions, the judges observed that no direction as sought by the petitioner could be issued at the eleventh hour. They, however, observed that Southern Railway could consider on a case to case basis the possibility of granting leave to the employees on April 19, the polling day in Tamil Nadu.
