The Election Commission of India has formally locked in the reporting hierarchy for Director General (IT) Seema Khanna. Under the November 4 order, the entire IT/ICT division now falls under the charge of Dr Pawan Kumar Sharma, a senior officer. Khanna is required to route her files through Sharma before they reach the top table. This is a decisive shift from the chaotic interim period that followed the July 28 directive.
The previous order, issued by Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Manish Garg, had directed Khanna to report directly to the Commission. But that move triggered immediate friction. Both Election Commissioners, SS Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, objected to the legality of bypassing the Deputy Election Commissioner layer. They even went so far as to write a confidential letter to the Cabinet Secretary, flagging deep concerns over the episode. That order was kept in abeyance, leaving Khanna in a supervisory limbo until now.
Garg, who had been the "link officer" handling the IT portfolio after the transfer of Deputy EC Sanjay Kumar to the Delhi government, has been relieved of that charge. He now handles Election Planning, EVMs, and EDMD, along with zonal oversight for UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarha. This restructuring effectively removes Garg from the direct line of fire regarding digital voter roll infrastructure. Khanna, an officer from the National Informatics Centre, remains central to the controversy over embedded restrictions in electoral software systems.
The new arrangement clarifies that Khanna will not report directly to the Commission until the next phase of the hierarchy is tested. She will report to Raj Purohit, who joined as a Deputy EC recently, according to a senior ECI official speaking to PTI. The bureaucracy has finally stopped spinning its wheels. The next test will be how smoothly the IT division operates under Sharma’s watch during the upcoming electoral cycles.