President's Message

Even though required by pandemic, the necessity to enforce norms of social distancing, lockdown and restrictions on movement led to led to the rise of authoritarian trends in governance and enforcement even in those jurisdictions where maximum value is attached to individual rights and freedoms.

India has been no exception to this worldwide phenomena. Her diversity and complexities and status of a developing country having second highest population in the world posed additional challenges.

The digital divide in legal profession became suddenly very pronounced due to abrupt switch over to virtual courts to ensure hearings which had to be stopped due to the the pandemic. It became a serious challenge for the courts, individual lawyers and the Bar Associations to ensure that more and more legal professionals could meet these challenges and get equipped to perform their professionals duty in a digital environment.

Professional earnings of lawyers got severally impacted as also the fact that as individual professionals, lawyers in India lack a viable social security net.

Steps towards providing ad-hoc financial assistance and provision of group insurance were mitigating steps taken by many Bar Associations.

The Bar Association of India has been engaging intensively through pan India discussions in the Governing Council and panel discussions to find solutions in a manner that do not impact the dignity and independence of the profession and at the same time ensure that lawyers are able to get a viable social security net and have fall back financial provisions to meet the challenges which the current pandemic has made all of us alive to in the most brutal session.