India, Nov. 1 -- India's population census will finally be held in 2027 - six years too late. The mammoth exercise will require an army of temporary staff - officers, enumerators, supervisors. Once again, the government's go-to workforce will be schoolteachers. Under Section 27 of the Right to Education Act, 2009, teachers can be deployed for "non-academic" purposes, but only for elections, census, and disaster relief. The law was meant to be narrow. In practice, it has become a catch-all excuse to saddle teachers with administrative chores. The result is that teachers (overworked and, often, underpaid) are being forced to do the State's paperwork at the expense of their students' right to learn. In Manyar Hasina v. Election Commission (2024), a parent complained that election duties were disrupting her child's education because teachers were absent. The Bombay High Court merely 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 neglect is not new. In Election Commission v. St Mary's School (2007), the Supreme Court held that teachers could be allocated non-academic work only on non-teaching days. But the Court left key questions unanswered: What is "non-academic"? What if it affects teaching? And what if the exception becomes the rule? The situation worsened after the Supreme Court's decision in Executive Engineer v. Mahesh (2022), where it ruled that "relating to non-academic work" must 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. In Andhra Pradesh, teachers have been deployed as personal assistants. In Assam, they were sent to update the National Register of Citizens. In effect, teachers have been lawfully made to abandon classrooms. The cost of this mismanagement is not abstract. During the 2021 Uttar Pradesh panchayat elections, more than 1,600 teachers reportedly died from Covid-19. Teachers' associations have repeatedly protested non-teaching burdens, warning that they are unable to complete syllabi or maintain teaching quality. The toll is especially harsh on children in government schools, often from the poorest households. When teachers are missing or burnt out, learning stops. Each census, election, or verification drive may last only weeks, but its after-effects linger for years - in unfinished courses, poor results, and lost futures. Teachers are meant to teach, not administer State's logistical operations. The right to education is not a symbolic promise; it is a constitutional guarantee. But that guarantee collapses when the same people responsible for fulfilling it are overworked 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....