New Delhi/IBNS: 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.

"This is not adversarial," said the Chief Justice. "If the losing candidate wants clarification, the engineer can give clarification that there has been no tampering," he added.

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.

CJI Khanna questioned the poll body why the data was cleared and ordered that it ensure that EVM data is not deleted.

The court's comments came while it was hearing a petition by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), Haryana, and a group of Congress leaders.

The petitions sought the court to direct the poll body to formulate a policy for checking the original burnt memory/microcontroller of EVM components.

The petition has also demanded that the burnt memory and microcontroller of EVM be verified by engineers to prove that EVM has not been tampered with.

The next hearing will be held on March 17.