‘I've Sat on the Bench for 20+ Years. Here's What Nobody Tells You About Being a Judge.’

To sit on the bench is to serve as the judge presiding in court. The judge sits at the dais, hears the parties, manages proceedings and applies the law to the dispute. This role carries authority, but it does not make judges superhuman. Bamba stresses that judges are as human as anyone else.

The pressure can be intense. Lawyers or parties may scream, while the judge must remain composed. Bamba recalls finding sindoor smeared on a thread under her courtroom table. A colleague found cut hair inside a case file. These incidents show the personal pressures that may never appear in a judgment.

A judge’s work also includes handling the cause list, recording evidence and deciding whether cases can be disposed of. Bamba’s courtroom sometimes recorded evidence from 10 am to 4 pm in CBI and terror-funding trials. Sitting on the bench therefore means combining authority, patience and careful decision-making under scrutiny.

Poonam Bamba is a retired High Court judge who describes judging as demanding, deeply human work. Before entering the judiciary, she worked in the corporate world. Her move shows that a judicial career can begin outside the traditional courtroom path described in the article.

In 2002, Bamba joined the district judiciary, where disputes usually reach a judge first. She took her oath before the district judge in a quiet ceremony without much pomp. That first oath stayed important to her. She wanted her work to help at least one person appearing before her each day.

Bamba was later elevated to the High Court, where the oath ceremony was more formal. Her career exposed her to ordinary district cases, heavy magistrate workloads, CBI investigations and terror-funding trials. She now uses those experiences to explain the pressure faced by judges, court staff and police witnesses.

A cause list is the schedule of matters listed for hearing that day. Pendency means cases that remain undecided. Disposal is the court’s term for deciding and closing a case. These three measures describe different parts of judicial workload, rather than simply counting how many cases a judge sees.

For example, magistrates in Bamba’s district handled 125 to 150 cases daily while facing a pendency of 36,000 cases. Additional sessions judges heard fewer matters, but murder trials required them to record evidence from 10 am onward. The number of listed cases therefore depends heavily on the court and the type of work.

Bamba’s later courtroom handled trials with 10,000 or even 20,000 documents. Evidence recording could fill the day without producing a disposal. Court statistics may then show no case closed, even though the judge, stenographer and witnesses worked continuously.

India’s court backlog reached 5.64 crore cases across the Supreme Court, 25 High Courts and district and subordinate courts, according to the Law Minister’s Rajya Sabha statement on 23 July 2026. The figure shows the scale of unresolved legal work across the system.

National Judicial Data Grid figures reported on 28 July put 4.98 crore cases in district and subordinate courts. High Courts accounted for another 63.76 lakh cases. These figures matter because most disputes first reach the lower courts, where judges also face large daily cause lists and complex trials.

Staffing adds another pressure. NewsBytes reported 7,311 vacancies in subordinate courts against a sanctioned strength of 30,868 judges. The article connects these numbers with the wider challenge of delay, while also noting that workloads differ by court. A magistrate, sessions judge and High Court judge may face very different kinds of pressure.

Disposal requires a case to be decided and closed. Recording evidence is different: it is a necessary stage of examining witnesses and building the trial record. A judge can therefore work continuously without completing the case counted in the statistics. This distinction matters when raw disposal figures are used to judge performance.

Bamba’s courtroom handled CBI and terror-funding trials where evidence recording ran from 10 am to 4 pm. Some cases contained 10,000 documents, and others contained 20,000. The judge had to work through that material carefully, while stenographers recorded proceedings and police officers sometimes appeared as witnesses after long shifts.

The result is a demanding day with no disposal. The article says that a full day of careful work may not appear in statistics at all. Understanding the difference between progress and closure gives a more accurate picture of why complex trials can contribute to pendency.

Complaints about a district judge’s conduct have an internal route. A complaint first goes to that court’s district judge. The district judge may counsel the colleague informally or call them in separately. Lawyers can raise concerns similarly. Complaints may involve rudeness, late sitting or refusal to hear urgent mentions.

Bamba describes a case in which she deputed a senior officer to sit quietly in a courtroom, observe a judge’s conduct and report back. Allegations with a vigilance angle, including corruption or favouritism, go to the High Court. Citizens increasingly record videos, which adds to public scrutiny of courtroom behaviour.

High Court scrutiny is described as especially extensive. It examines conduct and individual judgments. The article gives the example of a sessions judge criticised after granting bail and later portrayed in an AI-generated newspaper image. The source does not explain a separate complaint procedure for High Court or Supreme Court judges, only that they follow different rules.

Judicial independence means a judge can hear evidence and apply the law without threats, favouritism or pressure from powerful people. It matters because decisions affect both sides of a dispute. Bamba’s stories of sindoor, cut hair and people screaming in court show why judges need protection from personal pressure while remaining calm.

Independence is not immunity. District judges follow conduct rules, and complaints can reach the district judge or High Court. Observations, counselling and scrutiny of judgments provide oversight. The article also notes that citizens increasingly record courtroom conduct. These mechanisms allow concerns to be examined without making every complaint an automatic removal.

The source does not state removal rules for higher-court judges. Under established Indian constitutional law, Parliament removes Supreme Court or High Court judges only through a prescribed process for proved misbehaviour or incapacity. This high threshold protects independence, while formal complaints and review preserve public accountability. The article itself does not describe that process in detail.