Plea in Madras HC to not proceed with election of trustees

Chennai: An alumnus of Pachaiyappa's College has approached the Madras high court to direct the interim administrator not to proceed any further in relation to the election of electing the trustees of Pachaiyappa's Trust Board until the defective voters list in the post graduate, graduate and research scholar constituency is rectified.

Justice R. Subramaniam before whom the application filed by G. Anbazhagan came up for hearing, ordered notice to the Interim Administrator of Pachaiyappa's Board Trust Board and posted to March 20, further hearing of the case.

 According to petitioner, the interim reports filed by the Interim Administrator has pointed out the unlawful and illegal acts of the last outgoing trustees in respect of which a separate application has been moved for suitable directions. As per the election schedule, the Interim Administrator has released the voters list which contains 1,144 eligible voters. To his utter surprise, there were very few voters in the list from all the six colleges of the Pachaiyappa's Trust. With this truncated voter list, if the elections were conducted, it will be a mockery of democracy, because for a successful democratic body, participation of large number of electorate was essential. The final list of voters were only 1,144 voters in Graduates constituency, during the previous elections, it was about 3,041 voters, but now the total number of voters was reduced to 1,144 voters, that too after the inclusion of 640 new voters. Out of these 1,144 voters, 900 voters were from Pachaiyappa's college, Chennai alone, he added.

He said all the six colleges were more than 3 to 4 decades old, in these circumstances, every year there were huge numbers of eligible voters crossing over 50,000 voters who meet the qualifying criteria to be a voter of the Graduates Constituency, but as per the interim administrator's report the voters list contains only 1,144 voters who were eligible to vote. Thus, large number of voters were being left out of the system. In order to ensure their participation, the time to register needs to be extended and the election schedule should be suitably modified, he added.