It’s not only the health department and the government which are serious about containing the spread of the deadly Coronavirus in India but the courts too are playing their part in fighting the pandemic.
In the past one fortnight, the Patna High Court has set some really interesting conditions for granting bails to the persons jailed for charges as serious as Dalit atrocities, fraud and liquor smuggling. They all have been told to join the fight against the Covid-19 or deposit money in the PM CARES Fund to avail bails.
In a fresh incident, a villager Manoj Singh, charged with torturing a Dalit woman in Begusarai district, has been granted bail by the Patna High Court on the condition that he serves Corona patients at the local hospitals for three months. The accused had been cooling heels in the Begusarai jail for the past over four months.
“The court is granting bail to you with the rider that you serve the Corona patients admitted to the local hospital as a volunteer for three months,” a court official said quoting the judge Anil Kumar Upadhyay who granted the bail. The man has been told to promptly report to the district civil surgeon office after walking out of the jail and carry out the services to be assigned by the health department. The accused had been sent to jail on 25 January this year after he was charged with assaulting, molesting and shabbily treating a Dalit woman.
Similarly, three persons charged with smuggle of liquor in “dry” Bihar have been granted bail by the Patna High Court on the condition that they deposit money in the PM CARES Fund.
Accused Santosh Sahni, from whose possession 18 litres of country liquor was seized by the police, was told to deposit Rs 5,000 in the fund. Two other accused persons, Santosh and Munna Miyan were told to deposit Rs 25,000 and Rs 5,000 respectively in the PM CARES Fund to get bail by the court.
As many as 3,526 litres of foreign liquor had been recovered from the truck owned by Santosh while 208.80 litres of liquor was seized from the truck owned by Munna Miya, as per reports.
A builder, arrested on the charges of forgery and cheating, on the other hand, was granted bail last week by the Patna High Court with the rider that he joins the government’s fight against the Covid-19 for at least three months.
The builder, identified as Khalid Rashid had allegedly cheated Kumari Priyanka who was not given the possession of a flat she had booked in the apartment being constructed by him in Patna despite receiving the full amount.
As her all requests went unattended, she finally registered a case with the Kotwali Police Station in August 2018 after which the builder was arrested and sent to jail. Since then he had been cooling his heels in the jail. The builder when coming out on bail has been assigned the duty of checking the body temperature of persons visiting the Patna Civil Court with the help of a laser thermometer.