NEW DELHI: Facing a grim scenario of 50 per cent of its staff testing positive for Covid, the Supreme Court on Monday decided that all Judges would function from their homes and the benches will assemble through video links.
The entire SC premises, including the courtrooms, are being sanitised and the benches will assemble an hour later than the scheduled time of either 10.30 or 11.30 am.
Prior to this, many benches led by CJI S A Bobde and Justices N V Ramana, R F Nariman, U U Lalit, A M Khanwilkar, Ashok Bhushan, L N Rao, S A Nazir, Navin Sinha were assembling on a bench in the courtrooms.
With the Covid positive cases among staff and their family members suddenly surging to an alarming level, the CJI and judges decided that utmost precaution was required to be taken to prevent a situation last year when as many as six SC judges had got infected with Coronavirus.
But with adequate precautions taken since then, the incidents of coronavirus infection among staff had reduced considerably.
With the SC E-Committee, headed by Justice D Y Chandrachud, proactively purchasing 1,600 video links for the purpose of conducting hearing of cases through video-conferencing, there is adequate bandwidth and links available with the SC to avoid disruption during the virtual hearing of cases.
