If you were appointed on January 27, 1950, you would be getting much less than your colleague who’s sitting in the same court next to you, because he was drawing a higher salary.
So this anomaly has now been resolved with the pay commissions. Salaries and perquisites have increased a lot, but it’s still not commensurate with what a successful lawyer in a metropolitan city would be making if he were not a judge and had remained in practice.
That is something that needs to be addressed. Again, I don’t know how the system can be improved to attract good people to become judges. Because when you get third-grade lawyers who think that everyone is interested in career progression, and so people will take up judgeship if it brings something more to them. Such people wouldn’t have had much practice at the Bar.
And these are not the kind of people that you want to make judges without that kind of experience, without that kind of exposure, without that kind of knowledge.
Of course, there are several who are unlucky and don’t have a practice and make excellent judges. But by and large, if you’ve not had a good practice for 15 years and you’re still struggling at age 45, you’re not good material to be made a judge.
Source: Barandbench
