New Delhi: An escalating internal conflict within the Election Commission of India has brought two senior officials, Director General of Information Technology Seema Khanna and Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg, under intense scrutiny over administrative and technical decisions linked to the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. The development comes amid formal dissents and objections recorded by Election Commissioners S.S. Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, who questioned being excluded from consultations on major policy directives and highlighted serious concerns regarding the operation of the poll body’s unified digital platform, ECINet.
The two Election Commissioners raised persistent questions about centralized control over the voter registry, pointing out that critical administrative and software modifications were implemented without the commission’s institutional consensus. Their objections specifically centered on the operational jurisdiction of senior personnel overseeing information technology and administrative allocations within the election watchdog.
Dr. Seema Khanna, who leads the commission’s IT directorate, oversees the core digital infrastructure utilized for voter registration across all electoral tiers. The controversy centers on reports alleging that access to the voter database on ECINet has become heavily centralized within the headquarters IT division, restricting the administrative authority traditionally exercised by field officers such as Electoral Registration Officers, District Election Officers, and Chief Electoral Officers. Sandhu and Joshi independently flagged these operational constraints, with Sandhu questioning whether the IT wing possessed any statutory power to curtail or filter the legal responsibilities vested in local registration officers.
Khanna joined the commission on deputation in 2025, having previously worked with the National Informatics Centre under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Holding postgraduate and doctoral qualifications in information security from IIT Delhi, she had earlier contributed to the development and deployment of the Aarogya Setu platform during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maneesh Garg, a 1996-batch IAS officer of the Himachal Pradesh cadre serving on central deputation as Senior Deputy Election Commissioner, has similarly drawn scrutiny over unilateral internal governance shifts. After assuming additional administrative responsibilities, Garg reportedly altered work allocations without consulting Commissioners Sandhu and Joshi, including removing a fellow officer from the oversight of the DG IT. The move prompted objections from both commissioners, who subsequently approached the Cabinet Secretary seeking appropriate administrative intervention. Garg previously served as Himachal Pradesh’s Chief Electoral Officer from 2022 to 2024 and held senior bureaucratic postings in the Union Education Ministry before his central deputation tenure was upgraded to Additional Secretary.
