May, 16 2025
Warm & sweet: Delhi HC cafe serves diversity dessert with paycheque
Its 10 neurodiverse staff members had collectively reached a milestone about a month after CJI DY Chandrachud had opened the cafe. On Tuesday, they got their first paycheques from acting chief justice Manmohan.
The neurodiverse employees - the cafe on the high court premises is an outlet of a well-known South Indian restaurant chain - work as cashiers, servers, managers and sales associates. Sagar Express also has baked goods and other food items. The employees also take customer feedback through its "Silent Roar" sales associates - a role tailored for non-verbal persons who use augmentative and alternative communication or AAC devices. The employees use a tablet or a laptop that is neurodiverse-friendly to communicate using speech, pictures and other tools to take feedback. The initiative of starting the cafe was taken by the high court bar association at Glass Canteen of the court in collaboration with an NGO - Shaurya Foundation Trust (SFT). It is the brainchild of senior HC advocate Ravi Gupta and the chairman of SFT.
Anju Mittal, mother of Varun Brij (24) who manages the bain marie food warming station at Sagar Express, said her son "is good at singing and computers too. He is a highly energetic and creative individual. He has to go miles, he says."
