Owing to continued rise in Covid-19 cases in India, the chances of safely starting proceedings for the much-awaited monsoon session of Parliament in August are seem to be less. It is more likely to start in the month of September, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

In order to finalise the dates for the session, India’s top legislative authorities, including Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla, are keeping a close watch on the status of the pandemic in the Capital and elsewhere. Delhi’s improvement in recent weeks gives a glimmer of hope but greater progress in the Capital’s fight against Covid-19, and some measure of control in other parts of the country may be needed to ensure suitable attendance by members, the people cited above indicated.

Parliament has a window till September 23 to start the monsoon session, as under the Indian Constitution, the duration between the end of one session and the start of the next cannot exceed six months, after the budget session ended on March 23, two days before a 68-day national lockdown kicked in.

Officials involved in the planning of the session say they would require at least four weeks to put the arrangements in place, Once the dates are finalised.

The major challenge here is logistic issue because scheduling the session will require special Covid-19 arrangements – from the seating of MPs to ensure social distancing, to the timing of the proceedings in the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha, which are likely to work in shifts to avoid crowding.

“There’s not a heavy business to transact. The priority of the government is to clear the ordinances promulgated in the past few months and the Opposition might press for debates on the Covid-19 pandemic and the Indo-China border conflict,” said a second official involved in the preparations.

According to a third official, ”Naidu inform the home ministry that government officials don’t have to isolate themselves after travelling to other places. If they can be exempted from isolation for doing official duty, MPs too travelling on official duty should be given the same exemptions. The home ministry has agreed,” a third official said.

Giant screens to beam parliamentary proceedings, with engineers from the National Informatics Centre on call, and provisions for possible latency — these are among the issues Naidu and Birla and their teams are discussing.