Under her courtroom table one day, Poonam Bamba found a red thread smeared with sindoor. Her peon, the court attendant who looks after the courtroom, urged her to wait. “Ma’am, please don’t come to the dais yet,” he said. “We are getting it cleaned, and only then should you come.”
A colleague once opened a case file and found cut hair inside it. The retired High Court judge says such moments belong to the part of judging that never reaches a judgment, and she keeps returning to them when she explains who sits on the bench. “People don’t know that kind of pressure,” she says.
For Bamba, the point of these stories is simple. “Judges are not gods. They are as human as you and I are, and it is not easy to sit in that moment, listen to two people screaming at you and still maintain your calm,” she tells The Better India.
From the corporate world to the district bench
Her own journey began far from a courtroom. In 2002, after a career in the corporate world, Bamba joined the district judiciary, the trial courts where most disputes first reach a judge. She took her oath quietly, before the district judge, in a ceremony she describes as far from pompous.
From 125–150 cases a day to trials involving thousands of documents, Bamba describes the demanding realities of India’s district courts. Photograph: (Bar and Bench)
She was later elevated to the High Court, where the oath is a formal ceremony, but the quieter first one stayed with her. “I won’t say that I made very big promises, but whenever I saw people appearing before me, there was always a desire that even if you help one person, your day is made,” she says.
A demanding routine
That desire met a demanding routine almost at once. A judge’s day begins with a cause list, the schedule of matters listed for hearing, and its length depends entirely on the court. Magistrates in her district handled 125 to 150 cases a day, against a pendency, or backlog of undecided cases, of 36,000, which she links largely to cheque-bouncing disputes.
She corrects the common belief that every judge faces the same load. Additional sessions judges hear fewer matters, but murder trials keep them recording evidence from 10 am onwards. A judge in Canada or the US, she notes, may hear far fewer cases in a day.
Her own courtroom later handled cases investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and terror-funding trials, where evidence recording ran continuously from 10 am to 4 pm. Some of those days ended without a single disposal, the term courts use for a case that has been decided and closed.
Bamba credits stenographers, police officers and court staff, whose long hours and behind-the-scenes work keep the justice system running. Photograph: (AI-Generated image)
“There are 10,000 documents in a case, and there are sometimes 20,000 documents in a case,” she says. A full day of careful work, in other words, may not appear in the statistics at all.
Bamba is quick to credit the people who share the room. Stenographers work the same hours as the judge, and even a short break means arranging for a colleague to take their seat.
“Our stenographers are not able to move from their seats,” she says. Police officers, she adds, sometimes work 36-hour shifts and are then deputed to give witness testimony straight after duty. In her view, they are as committed and as underappreciated as the judges they work alongside.
Their effort sits within a national picture. Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal told the Rajya Sabha on 23 July 2026 that 5.64 crore cases are pending across the Supreme Court, the 25 High Courts and the district and subordinate courts.
National Judicial Data Grid figures as of 28 July, reported by Bar and Bench, show that 4.98 crore of those cases are in district and subordinate courts and 63.76 lakh are in the High Courts. NewsBytes reports that subordinate courts have 7,311 vacancies against a sanctioned strength of 30,868 judges.
A judge answers to many people
Bamba does not present the bench as a place beyond questions. The district judiciary, she says, follows the same conduct rules as IAS and IPS officers. “There is nothing different about us, as far as the district judiciary is concerned.”
Citizens unhappy with a district judge’s conduct have a clear route. A complaint goes first to the district judge of that court, who can counsel the colleague informally or call them in separately. Lawyers can raise concerns in the same way. In one case, Bamba deputed a senior officer to sit quietly in a courtroom, observe a judge’s conduct and report back.
After more than two decades in the judiciary, Bamba urges young judges to approach the bench with humility, patience and empathy. Photograph: (TNIE)
Typical complaints concern rudeness, sitting late or refusing urgent mentions, and she says citizens now notice. “Citizens are very alert these days,” she says, and they increasingly record videos. Complaints with a vigilance angle, such as allegations of corruption or favouritism, go to the High Court.
“The kind of scrutiny that happens in high courts, you cannot imagine,” she says, adding that it reaches beyond a judge’s conduct to individual judgments. She cites a sessions judge who granted bail, was criticised in the High Court for not knowing the law, and was then depicted in the Times of India in an AI-generated image walking to the Judicial Academy with a bag on his back. “What more scrutiny?” she asks.
High Court and Supreme Court judges follow a different route, since the Constitution allows their removal only through impeachment. “The Constitution has already provided for that. Unless you amend the Constitution, what can we say?” she says.
Scrutiny in the age of the screen
Her strongest view concerns transparency. Bamba describes the judiciary as the most scrutinised institution in India. She believes audio-video recording and live streaming have opened proceedings to the public and invited more scrutiny than is warranted.
“I feel we are very transparent, and still face ample scrutiny. Judges are not perfect, but they also function under umpteen pressures the public does not see. No one can be more accountable than a judge,” she says.
Her concern lies in how the recordings travel once they leave the courtroom. “Social media just pulls out one word that falls from your mouth and blows it up, and people react to the clip without reading the full judgment or order,” she says.
The same pressure, she says, changes how a judge behaves. “Even saying sorry will come out in the video, and then it will be published in full as if the judge misbehaved and then said sorry. It is stealing the natural way of being,” she says.
For citizens seeking justice, Bamba emphasises knowing their rights, asking lawyers for clarity and turning to free legal aid when they need support. Photograph: (TNIE)
Technology has brought new demands as well. Video conferencing, introduced during Covid for remote appearances, is now sometimes misused. In her own court, a senior advocate appearing online said mid-hearing, “Excuse me, ma’am, my turn has come in the High Court,” and vanished from the screen.
“That was actually a serious misconduct. You just cannot run away from a district judge’s court,” she says. District judges have no contempt power of their own and must send a reference to the High Court, yet she chose another path. “I never believed in making references. I would rather decide a case at that time,” she says.
She doubts that artificial intelligence can ease the load in district courts yet. “AI can help you find similar judgments, but not this,” she says, referring to the summarising of petitions. Most district courts still receive hard copies, while the Delhi High Court is fully digitised.
What she tells young judges
For young judges and lawyers, Bamba’s advice begins with the self. “Power is given to us to dispense justice and not to flaunt,” she says. “One’s behaviour and attitude go a long way, so I would tell them to work on themselves first. When you can manage yourself, you can manage human resources, whether it is court staff, a litigant or a lawyer.”
Her method is practical, and she illustrates it with an example from her own bench. On several occasions, Bamba has spent hours, even days, studying evidence and preparing a judgment, only for one of the parties to seek an adjournment and delay the case further.
“This has happened many times even though the case is more or less through. But instead of losing my cool, I learnt it is better to give a shorter date as requested. These are accommodations judges have to make all the time, despite packed schedules, workload and pressures,” she says.
She also trained herself to let provocation pass. “There have been times when lawyers or others have been rude to me and other judges. Lack of respect is very common and in these situations it is easy for any human to lose their temper. Over time, I trained myself to just ignore it as if I have not heard,” she says. Whenever one gets angry, she adds, one should keep a little humility.
In one such instance, a heated exchange ended and the day’s cases were done, and she treated the matter as closed. The lawyer later apologised, and she considered it over. “They are not always bad or intentionally disrespectful. Empathy and placing ourselves in others’ shoes is vital in this line of work,” she says.
What citizens can do
Bamba believes citizens can ease the workload too, and she starts with the conversation between a litigant and a lawyer.
“A citizen has every right to question their lawyer, ask for clarity, and push for a hearing date that feels realistic to them. Most of them are unaware of their own rights and some lawyers take advantage. Being aware as a citizen is important if they are visiting the court,” she says.
Understanding courts, however, takes effort, and Bamba admits it is hard to build. “Nobody wants to go to court,” she says. Many people cannot afford to lose a day’s wages to attend hearings, and even educated citizens and journalists tend to rely on media reports rather than reading the judgments themselves.
The pressures that don’t end there
For judges, the strain does not stop at the courtroom door. Bamba recalls that in the days of typewriters, a single typing error could ruin an entire page and force the typist to start over. That pressure kept filings short and precise. Today, with copy and paste, lawyers can pad petitions to 100 or 200 pages with little effort.
“We judges are also humans, and it takes us days to go through those files. But upon reading, we often realise that the same fact is stated in at least 20 ways, just to show the client that they have made such a comprehensive petition for them,” she says.
Unscrupulous lawyers, she adds, make the process harder for everyone. Some tell clients, “Give me Rs 50,000 and the matter will be decided in your favour,” while the judge has no idea who is selling their name and judgment outside the courtroom. “Generally, unscrupulous lawyers play a very dirty role and judges bear the brunt,” she says.
Where to find help
Bamba points to the services already in place. Legal services authorities run legal literacy campaigns and deploy paralegal volunteers to explain court procedures, though she says few people make use of them. The most direct help is free legal aid.
“The National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) runs a toll-free helpline on 15100 for those who qualify: women, children, members of Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, persons with disabilities, persons in custody, and anyone whose annual income is below Rs 1,00,000 (or the limit notified by the Central or state government),” she explains.
Applicants can submit an application on plain paper to the relevant legal services authority or fill in an e-form on the official portal. They can also visit legal aid clinics at courts and police stations, where legal aid lawyers and trained paralegal volunteers offer advice in person.
A quieter kind of justice
For Bamba, all of this returns to the people on both sides of the bench. Judges who work on themselves, litigants who plan realistically with their lawyers and citizens who know where to find help can make the process gentler for the stenographers, police and court staff who hold it together.
The red thread under the table, the hair in the case file and the 20,000 documents in a single trial will never appear in a judgment or a statistic. They are the unseen weight of the job, and Bamba wants people to know it is carried by someone who is, in her own words, as human as everyone else in the room.
It is the same belief she carried into that modest oath in 2002: that if she helps even one person, the day has been worthwhile.
