On the 12th of April, the Supreme Court (SC) granted work from home to all the judges. The decision was taken in the wake of the rising number of the Novel Coronavirus or COVID- 19.
Recently, many media sources reported 50 % of the Top Court staff to be positive for the COVID-19 infection. However, the Apex Court confirmed 44 staff to have tested positive for COVID-19 on the 12th of April.
The Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde said the Court needs to take precautions to avoid a situation like 2020, when six SC judges contracted the virus. In regard to this, the Top Court issued an official notification.
The CJI also directed all judges to work from home and benches hearing petitions would assemble through video links like Google Meet and Zoom. The benches even sat an hour late from their scheduled time of 10:30 today, the 12th of April. In addition, the notification also suspended physical mentioning of cases for urgent hearing by advocates from Monday till further orders.
Meanwhile, during the work from home tenure, the entire premises of the SC including courtrooms would be sanitized.
Prior to these arrangements, 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 scheduled to assemble in the courtrooms.
