Madras HC restrains Pachaiyappa's trust board from issuing poll notification

Chennai: The Madras high court has restrained the interim administrator, Pachaiyappa’s Board Trust Board and secretary of Pachaiyappa’s Trust Board from issuing any notification for the election of trustees of the Trust Board of Pachaiyappas Trust.

Justice R.Sureshkumar also ordered notice to the interim administrator and secretary of Pachaiyappas Trust board on an application filed by L.Chenkuttuvan, an alumnus of Pachaiyappa’s college.

Petitioner’s counsel R.C.Paul Kanagaraj submitted that as per the report of the Interim Administrator the draft voters list will be published on February 13, 2019 and final voters list on March 1, 2019 and the date of the polling on April 21, 2019, and after counting the results would be declared on April 22, 2019. As per the schedule the Interim Administrator has released the voters list which contains 1,144 eligible voters. To the utter surprise of the petitioner, there were very few voters in the list from all the other five colleges of the Pachaiyappa’s Trust. With the truncated voters 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 necessary. All the six colleges of the trust were more than three to four decades old.

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 contain only 1,144 voters. Thus, large eligible 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 suitably modified. Therefore, the petitioner has filed the present petition, he added.