All schools told to finish exams before April 10

The Election Commission on Sunday announced that Parliamentary elections for Tamil Nadu will be held on April 18 in a single phase. In addition, there will by-elections too for 18 vacant assembly seats.

With board exams for Classes 11 and 12 have already started, Class 10 exams will also be conducted from March 14. However, all the three board exams will be over before March end.

A senior official from the School Education Department told DT Next on Monday that the directorate was planning to conduct exams for Classes 1 to 9 from the first week of April.

“Since the EC had announced the poll schedule, the Directorate of School Education has issued orders to all the schools, including private institutions to conduct the annual examinations before April 10 so that student will not be affected due to the elections,” he added.

Tamil Nadu Teachers’ Association president PK Illamaran said that the government move to conduct exams before the elections will not only help the students but also teachers, who will have time to involve in evaluation works.

In addition, the directorate also instructed the government teachers to be prepared for election duties, which would start in the first week of April itself.

Accordingly, teachers will be appointed as Booth Level Officers (BLO). Various functions of the BLO includes receiving claims and objections, house-to-house visit and checking of overlapping, migration, identification of non-existing electors among others.

More than 67,000 BLOs and about 6,000 supervisors will be appointed by the Election Commission for official poll related works in Tamil Nadu. Remunerations will be paid to all the teachers, who will be deployed for election duty.

Soon after the election works, the teachers will also be involved in answer sheets evaluation to publish the results as per schedule.