All the courts in Delhi, including Delhi High Court, have heard more than 11,427 urgent matters after the announcement of lockdown due to coronavirus COVID-19. There has been a progress in hearing of urgent matters in Delhi High Court.
Initially, when the hearings started taking place through videoconferencing, it was confined to extremely urgent matters. However, with the experience and after taking regular inputs from the Bar, presently, all the urgent matters of all kinds are being taken up by the Delhi High Court as well as the courts subordinate to it. The mentioning in High Court is exclusively through a two-tier weblink.
From the initial one Division Bench and one Single Bench, the number was gradually increased to two Division Benches and four Single Benches. These benches were earlier sitting on alternate days. However, for the last one week, two Division Benches and six Single Benches are sitting on all the working days. This is automatically going to take care of more than 80 urgent matters a day, in contrast to three to five matters a day in the beginning.
The facility of videoconferencing has already been set up within the court complex of Delhi High Court for those advocates who do not have the requisite infrastructure in their respective residences or offices. The District Courts have also been directed to create such facility in their respective court complexes.
A committee said that the number of Benches can be increased further, depending on the workload. Though the suspension of functioning has been extended till May 17 but the hearing of mentioning and urgent matters will be heard through video conferencing as being done before.
