A voters’ queue in front of a Singur booth. (Amit Datta)

Nanoor, May 14: A schoolteacher who was declared “unfit” for poll duty by a medical board because he had Parkin-son’s disease has been served a notice by the Birbhum administration saying he should go on leave and not draw his salary.

Bolpur subdivisional officer Utpal Biswas’s contention was that the elec-tion duty and the teacher’s job were both government services and someone unfit for one should also be unfit for the other.

Fifty-nine-year-old Mukul Mukherjee, an English teacher at state-aided Nanoor High School, was told to submit the notice to the headmaster.

Biswas said: “The medical board is not there to see if the person sent for a test is going for election duty or some other government job. The board is to find out whether the candidate is fit. In this case, both are government jobs.”

He added that many people were trying to skip election duty citing illnesses.

Told that the teacher possessed a certificate saying he was “disabled”, the SDO said: “He has been declared unfit. So, he should retire.”

Mukherjee, who has been a teacher for over two decades, said he felt humiliated by the way he was treated. “I am suffering from Parkinson’s disease for over 20 years and I have a medical certificate to prove it. When I was called for poll duty I applied to the Bolpur SDO requesting that I be excused. But I feel extremely humiliated at what transpired,” he said.

The superintendent of the Bolpur sub-divisional hospital, Shuvabrata Ghosh, had led the six-member medical board before which Mukherjee had appeared.

Ghosh said: “His (Mukherjee’s) disability was genuine. He is a patient of Parkinson’s disease and his hands were shaking while writing. On this ground, we declared him unfit.”

The doctor added that the disease “should not come in the way of his teaching”. With his shaky handwriting, Mukherjee, however, would have faced trouble at the polling booth.

“The disease has never hampered my teaching. I was shocked to be told to go on leave for being unfit for election work,” said Mukherjee.

District inspector of schools (secondary) Sukumar Roy said that the SDO had no authority to issue such a notice. “It is for the school managing committee to decide because it is the teacher’s appointing authority,” Roy said.

Headmaster Umesh Chandra Mondal said Mukherjee was “a very good teacher, who took classes regularly”.

“The disease never affected his teaching.”