After restricting restaurants to takeaways, Delhi orders work from home for all private offices

Employees at private firms in New Delhi will have to mandatory switch to ‘Work From Home’ to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the National Capital.

An order issued by the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA), on Tuesday has instructed the closure of all private offices in Delhi.

All private offices in Delhi shall be closed, except those which are falling under the exempted category; work from home shall be followed. All restaurants & bars shall be closed, takeaways allowed: DDMA in its revised guidelines pic.twitter.com/Or74McCXKI

— ANI (@ANI) January 11, 2022

Earlier, private offices could function with half their employees in office and the rest at home.

In the revised guidelines issued by the DDMA, only those private offices will be allowed to stay open which fall under the essential services/exempted category.

According to the order, these are the companies which are exempted:
• Private banks
• Offices of companies providing essential services
• Insurance/Mediclaim companies
• Pharmaceutical company offices needed for management of production/distribution
• RBI regulated entities
• All non-banking financial corporations
• All micro-finance institutions
• Offices of advocates if operations of courts, tribunals are on
• Courier services

READ DDMA'S FULL ORDER HERE

DDMA Order No 509 Dt 11.01.21 by Roshneesh K'Maneck on Scribd

The order for private firms comes a day after DDMA had prohibited dine-in service at restaurants but allowed takeaways.

As per previous rules, restaurants were allowed to operate dine-in facility at 50 percent of their seating capacity from 8 am to 10 pm. Bars in the city were also permitted to open with 50 percent seating capacity from 12 noon to 10 pm.

Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal, who had chaired a meeting on the COVID-19 curbs on Monday, had tweeted: "In view of the increase in positive cases it was decided to close the restaurants and bars and to allow 'take away' facility only. It was also decided to allow operation of only one weekly market per day per zone."

The new restrictions came after the National Capital logged 17 more deaths due to COVID-19 and 19,166 infections in a day. The positivity rate had risen to 25 percent, the highest since 4 May last year, according to the city health department's data on Monday.

A total of 1,912 COVID patients are in hospitals. Of these, 65 are on ventilator support, government data showed. The city currently has 65,803 active cases of which 44,028 are in home isolation.

With inputs from agencies

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