Politics

EC Reassigns IT Oversight to New Deputy Election Commissioner

By Bharti Jain

The Election Commission has reallocated duties among its deputy election commissioners (DECs) and directors‑general following the appointment of DEC Prakash Rajpurohit. DG (IT) Seema Khanna, who manages the ECINet portal and application, will now submit all files related to the IT/ICT and grievances divisions to senior DEC Pawan Kumar Sharma. Sources say Khanna had previously routed these files through senior DEC Maneesh Garg, and before that through then‑DEC Sanjay Kumar. During DEC Bhanu Prakash Yeturu’s leave in July, Garg, acting as DEC (administration), issued a work‑allocation order that would have removed Khanna’s files from Kumar’s purview. The order was never implemented after objections from election commissioners S S Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, as recorded in the EC’s affidavit filed in the Supreme Court. Consequently, Khanna continued to route files through Kumar and later through his link officer, Maneesh Garg. Under the new work‑redistribution order dated 4 November, Pawan Kumar Sharma will serve as the deputy election commissioner in charge of the IT/ICT and grievance/PGRS divisions, with Khanna submitting files through him. Sandhu and Joshi had written separate letters to Cabinet Secretary T V Somanathan in late July, complaining about senior Garg’s actions. The letters alleged that Garg, after becoming link officer of then‑DEC (administration) Yeturu, issued an order on work allocation without consulting the commission or the two election commissioners, despite repeated oral instructions against such unilateral decisions. The Cabinet Secretary forwarded the commissioners’ letters to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and acknowledged them. According to a file provided by the Cabinet Secretariat in response to an RTI request by Commodore Lokesh Batra (Retd), any action against Garg at that stage might be inappropriate because the letters were not sent by the commission as a whole and could be seen as interference in the functioning of the constitutional body. Bharti Jain, senior editor with The Times of India, New Delhi, reports on security matters and has covered the Election Commission for several years.