Madras High Court asks Southern Railway to consider employees’ leave applications for voting in Lok Sabha elections

The Madras High Court recently 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..In an order passed on April 10, a bench of Chief Justice SV Gangapurwala and Justice J Sathya Narayana Prasad refrained from issuing any concrete directions to the Southern Railway authorities but said that the authorities should consider requests made by its employees to vote. .The Court passed the order on a public interest litigation filed by one V Ram Kumar.The petitioner approached the Court last week claiming that railway employees in Tamil Nadu had lost their right to cast postal votes in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls as Southern Railway (SR) had failed to approach the Election Commission of India (ECI) on time for the same. .On April 10, advocate Niranjan Rajagopalan who appeared for ECI, told the Court that the ECI never received any request for postal ballot from Southern Railway since the Railway authorities had mistakenly made such request to the Chennai collector instead of the ECI. He told the Court 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 for its employees. It had never made any request to ECI and therefore, the postal ballot facility has not been made available for SR in the upcoming elections though it would be available for organisations such as BSNL, Chennai Metro Rail, Bureau of Civil Aviation Security and State government employees.The ECI further said it was not possible now to extend such facilities to SR employees as the postal ballots had already been printed and the last date for individual electors to submit their requisition had expired on March 25. Further, the process of casting postal votes has already begun, the ECI said..The Court then recorded the submissions and said it was not possible to issue any directions to the ECI as sought by the petitioner but added that SR could consider leave applications made by its employees on a case to case basis.