Census of India needs teachers, but schools do even more

India's population census will finally take place in 2027 — six years too late. The mammoth exercise requires an army of temporary staff — officers, enumerators, supervisors. Once again, the government's go-to workforce will be schoolteachers.

Section 27 of the Right to Education Act, 2009 allows the deployment of teachers for "non-academic" purposes, but only for elections, census, and disaster relief. The statute was meant to be narrow. In practice, it has become the standard catch-all reason to saddle teachers with administrative chores. The effect of this is that teachers - overworked and often underpaid - are being made to do the State's paperwork at the cost of their students' right to learn.

In Manyar Hasina v. Election Commission, a parent complained that election duty was disrupting her child's education because teachers were absent. The Bombay High Court simply rescheduled polling to holidays. That solved the attendance issue, but only on paper. The judgment ignored what should have been obvious: when teachers spend their holidays as booth officers they return to school exhausted, and unprepared. Education suffers not just when teachers are absent, but also when they are overburdened.

This is not something that started yesterday. In Election Commission v. St Mary's School, the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that teachers could be assigned non-academic work only on days when teaching was not assigned. But the Court left some questions open: What is "non-academic"? What if it interferes with teaching? And what if the exception becomes the rule?

The situation further deteriorated since the Supreme Court, in Executive Engineer v. Mahesh 2022, ruled that “relating to non-academic work” should be given a wide interpretation. The floodgates opened to force any activity remotely connected to elections, census, or disaster relief upon teachers. The fallout has been immediate. In Nirbhay Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh 2022, the Court upheld the practice of assigning teachers electoral roll revisions.

States have exploited this interpretation, and teachers in Andhra Pradesh have been sent as personal assistants, whereas in Assam, they were deployed to update the National Register of Citizens. In effect, teachers have been legally made to abandon classrooms. This mismanagement does not come at an abstract cost. In the 2021 Uttar Pradesh panchayat elections, for example, it is reportedly estimated that over 1,600 teachers died from Covid-19. Teachers' associations have time and again protested non-teaching burdens, warning that they cannot finish syllabi or maintain teaching quality. The children who suffer most, apart from those of teachers, include children from often the poorest households attending government schools. When teachers go missing or burn out, learning stops. Each census, election, or verification drive may last only weeks, but its after-effects stretch over several years — in unfinished courses, poor results, and lost futures. Teachers are supposed to teach, not carry out State's logistic burdens. The right to education is not a mere slogan; it is a constitutional promise. That promise breaks the moment the very people responsible for discharging it are burdened and diverted. The lesson is simple but urgent: every hour a teacher spends collecting data or manning a polling booth is an hour stolen from a child's education. Teachers are not census clerks or election staff-they are the backbone of the right to education. Counting citizens means little if we stop teaching them first