New Delhi/IBNS, Feb. 11 -- The Supreme Court Tuesday directed the Election Commission not to delete data from Electronic Voting Machines in response to a petition that sought data to be retained in the machines even after the counting of votes is over.

A bench led by Chief Justice Sanjeev Khanna told the Election Commission to not delete any data from EVM nor reload any data for now.

The Election Commission has been asked to provide information to the court about the process of burning EVM memory and microcontroller after the elections.

The top court was told that engineers of BEL (Bharat Electronics Limited) had loaded dummy symbols and data in the EVMs and the data of the original machine was cleared.

The court's comments came while...