School teachers in the district can heave a sigh of relief as many of them will be excused from poll duty in the ensuing Assembly elections. District collector Chandrakant Dalvi said most of the teaching staff will be kept off poll duty as per their request.

During the Lok Sabha polls, about 11,000 teachers were away from their homes to attend to election duty.

“There have been requests from the teaching staff. We will keep their number minimum for poll-related duties. We will need more people considering the rise in the number of voters and auxiliary polling centres. But we will rope in other staff from departments for the purpose,” said Dalvi, who is also the chief election officer of the district.

The final list is yet to be readied. The election department has not yet finalised the list of auxiliary polling stations for the 21 constituencies in the district. Till date, the department has zeroed in on 30,000 government employees from nearly 126 government and semi-government organisations.

Deputy director of education (Pune region) Sunil Magar said it will be a welcome move if the staff strength for poll duties is reduced considering that more than 50 per cent of the staff is usually sent out on election duty. “This will affect the academics. Due to the swine flu fear schools were closed for quite sometime. It is a big responsibility on the teachers to cover the syllabus,” he said.

Earlier this month, a school teachers’ association had submitted a letter to Chief Minister Ashok Chavan requesting him to cut down the number of teachers on poll duty to 25 per cent of what it was last time. “Even a considerable reduction in the number of teachers on poll duty will help us,” said a primary education officer from the zilla parishad. The teachers were assigned work such as photo identity card distribution, preparation of electoral rolls, other poll/ counting day duties.

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