Telangana Bar Council says advocates are suffering, seeks Rs 25 crore as immediate assistance

HYDERABAD: Sending an SOS to chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, the Telangana State Bar Council has urged him to sanction and release Rs 25 crore immediately to enable the council to go to the rescue of the suffering advocates in the state.
Bar Council chairman A Narasimha Reddy in an appeal to the CM sought his urgent intervention in the matter as the Covid-19 has taken away scores of lives of advocates and their kin on one hand and crippled economically the lives of the surviving advocates on the other.
As courts are not functioning to their full capacity, the advocates are not able to eke out their livelihood from this profession and are struggling to make ends meet, he said. He thanked the CM for granting Rs 25 crore last year which could help the advocates to some extent. He also brought to the notice of the Chief Minister the gesture of AP which helped the advocates there with a liberal grant of Rs 25 crore to enable them to meet their medical insurance needs and a part of that grant was also used to extend loans to the needy advocates.
Narasimha Reddy described the conditions of junior advocates as pathetic and said that there is a need to help them urgently. We tried to help some of them who possess less than five years of experience last year by giving Rs 3500 each, but our limited resources got exhausted thereafter, he said. We have to give a stipend to the junior advocates and enhance the benefits being provided under the welfare fund Act, the Bar Council chairman said. We could not extend any help to them during those second wave of Coronavirus, he said urging the CM to enable the council to help the advocates in crisis.