Vijayawada: A PIL filed in the Supreme Court by former AP election commissioner and secretary to ‘Citizens for Democracy’, N. Ramesh Kumar, with a plea to maintain the “sanctity” of the electoral process, is likely to come up for hearing shortly.
The former SEC wanted the apex court to restrain the state government from having any blatant interference in preparation of the electoral rolls for the LS and assembly elections through involvement of gram/ward volunteers and village/ward secretariats.
The PIL claimed that they were basically the party cadre of the ruling YSRC. Instead, there should be the involvement of teachers in the process of registration of voters.
The PIL was filed in October with its respondents being the ECI, the AP government, AP’s chief electoral officer and others.
The PIL sought to nullify GO-MS-104 of the panchayat raj and rural development department dated 22-06-2019, issued by the AP government for positioning the village volunteers one per 50 households in the entire state. “This is illegal, arbitrary, unconstitutional and violative of Articles 21 and 243 of the Constitution,” the PIL argued.
It prayed to restrain the functionaries from involvement in the process of preparation of electoral rolls; to direct ECI to utilise the services of the employees of the government and teachers for preparation of electoral rolls and for conduct of elections in a free and fair manner; to constitute an empowered technical committee to examine the allegations of data breach and profiling by the state government through collection of data by village/ward volunteers and involvement of certain organisations like IPAC and Raminfo Private Ltd and to initiate appropriate criminal action against the errant officials for privacy breach of lakhs of citizens of the state.
Ramesh Kumar said, “We are expecting the PIL to come up for hearing in a day or two subject to its maintainability.” Earlier, SC judge Justice PK Mishra recused from hearing the PIL.
