Top Advocates of Apex Court fail to donate even a fraction of their daily earnings to COVID fund

Super-rich Advocates of the Apex Court, who command respect & money in equal measure, appear to be reluctant to donate even a fraction of their daily earnings to help the Supreme Court Bar Association's initiative to give a grant of Rs 20,000 to Lawyers who are facing financial hardship due to drastic reduction in litigation during the coronavirus-triggered lockdown.

On a rough estimate, there will be at least a dozen Senior & Noted Advocates whose daily earnings used to touch Rs one crore prior to the lockdown. It is also common knowledge that there are at least 100-odd advocates, practising in the Supreme Court, whose pre-lockdown monthly income exceeded Rs 1 crore.

But when the SC Bar Association, through its president Dushyant Dave, acting secretary Rohit Pandey & treasurer Meenesh Dubey, sought donations from its well-to-do members to create a distress fund from which ex-gratia grant of Rs 20,000 could be given to members to tide over the financial crisis, the response was at best less than lukewarm.

Some of the super-rich Lawyer-Politicians had criticised the Top Court for not coming to the help of the poor & destitutes by entertaining PILs by activists. Except Dushyant Dave, none of those critics donated a pie to the SCBA fund. Also, none of the 22 Senior Lawyers, who had written to the Chief Justice of India & Supreme Court Judges imploring them to intervene to help migrant workers prior to the Court initiating suo motu proceedings, featured in the list of donors to the SCBA benevolent fund. 

To inspire the rich section of Lawyers to contribute generously & lend a helping hand to the distressed advocates, SCBA president donated Rs 25 lakh. The example was followed by Ex-Additional Solicitor General PS Narasimha who pitched in with Rs 15 lakh & former SCBA president Vikas Singh who donated Rs 10 lakh. In all, only 19 members sent in their contributions. Those who donated Rs 5 lakh each included C S Vaidyanathan, Ritin Rai, C U Singh, K V Vishwanathan, Mahesh Jethmalani & Guru Krishna Kumar.

Having collected Rs 96 lakh from donations, the SCBA doled out ex-gratia to its members whose income in the last year did not exceed Rs 8 lakh. It put in certain conditions for eligibility of advocates for availing the ex-gratia payment.

Prior to the grant, the SCBA had also floated a loan scheme that allowed members of the association to avail a maximum interest-free loan of Rs 25,000. In this scheme, the members had the option of repaying the loan in easy instalments in two years, which works out to a little over Rs 1,000 a month.

While the loan scheme drew its corpus from the Supreme Court Bar Association fund, the one-time ex-gratia grant scheme was independent of the funds at the disposal of the association & was built purely with voluntary donations from advocates.

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