Who can afford to become a judge?

On August 21, 2026, in Bhumika Trust v. Union of India, the Supreme Court, with Justice K Vinod Chandran dissenting, modified the direction issued 15 months earlier in All India Judges Association v. Union of India. The 3 years of practice at the Bar that had been made a condition of eligibility for the Civil Judge (Junior Division) examination were reduced to 1.

The judgment has been received as a relaxation. Read in full, it is not.

Under the framework, the Court has now laid down that recruitment notifications issued during the transitional period up to March 31, 2027 may proceed without the practice condition. Those issued on or after April 1, 2027 will require 1 year of verified active practice. A candidate who clears the examination is not appointed a judge. He or she is appointed a trainee judicial officer and must then complete 1 year of intensive training at the State Judicial Academy - a year the Court has deemed equivalent to 1 year of practice at the Bar - followed by a year of structured law clerkship, 6 months with a district and sessions judge and 6 months attached to a sitting High Court Judge. Through both years, the trainee receives a fixed emolument equal to one-half of the remuneration of a judicial magistrate first class. There is no designation. There is no seniority. Entry into regular judicial service follows only upon satisfactory evaluation at the end.

A person who has succeeded in a competitive selection to a constitutional office spends the first 2 years of that office on half pay, without rank, carrying another judge’s files.

There is no public service in India that treats a selected candidate in this manner. The IAS probationer at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy draws full pay and reckons seniority from the date of appointment. The cadet is commissioned. Doctors in service are paid as doctors while they are trained. Only the judiciary now proposes to make its recruits clerks before it makes them judges.

This is not a quibble about nomenclature. Appointment under Article 234, made by the Governor in accordance with rules framed in consultation with the State Public Service Commission and the High Court, is appointment to a judicial office. Control over the district judiciary - including probation, training, confirmation and discipline - vests in the High Court under Article 235. Everything the Court seeks to achieve - supervision, graduated exposure, assessment and the power to weed out the unfit - is available within the ordinary architecture of appointment followed by probation. Nothing in Articles 233 to 235 requires that the selected candidate be held outside service while it happens. The demotion is a design choice and it was not a necessary one.

The more serious consequence lies elsewhere and it appears to have escaped notice altogether.

For close to 6decades, the entrant to the subordinate judiciary had exactly one ladder. From Chandra Mohan v. State of UP, decided in 1966, through Satya Narain Singh v. High Court of Judicature at Allahabad (1985), to Dheeraj Mor v. High Court of Delhi (2020), it was held that the direct recruitment channel to the post of district judge under Article 233(2) belonged to the Bar alone. A civil judge, however able, could not compete against those posts. He could reach the higher judicial service only by promotion and only when his turn on the seniority list arrived. Many officers of real quality spent the better part of their careers waiting for it.

That ended on October 9, 2025. In Rejanish KV v. K Deepa, a Constitution Bench of five judges held that the line of authority from Satya Narain Singh to Dheeraj Mor did not state the law correctly and overruled it. It held that a person who is or has been in judicial service, with a combined experience of 7 years or more as an advocate or as a judicial officer, is eligible to be considered for appointment as district judge or additional district judge by direct recruitment. To preserve a level playing field, the Court fixed a minimum age of 35 for both streams. The ruling operates prospectively from that date.

Rejanish changed the calculation for every young lawyer weighing the district judiciary. For the first time in 60 years, joining early was the rational choice: two routes upward instead of one and enough years left afterwards for the High Court to remain a realistic prospect rather than a courtesy at the end of a career.

Bhumika Trust now defers entry by 2-3 years and denies seniority for 2 of them. One judgment opened a door; the next, from the same Court within 10 months, narrows the corridor leading to it. The two decisions are pulling against each other and, so far as I can see, no one has said so.

This produces a question that will have to be answered and it would be far better answered in the rules than in litigation 5 years from now.

A trainee judicial officer is, by the express premise of the scheme, not in judicial service. That is why there is no designation, no seniority and no full pay. Yet, the academy year has been deemed equivalent to one year of practice at the Bar.

For the purposes of Article 233(2) then, what are those 2 years? A deeming fiction is ordinarily read for the purpose for which it was created and no further. The Court created this one to satisfy the 3-year eligibility condition it had itself imposed in 2025. It does not follow that the fiction travels to Article 233(2), where the question is whether an aspirant has 7 years of practice, of judicial service, or of the two combined. If the academy year is practice for one purpose and nothing for the other and if the clerkship year is neither, the young entrant is asked to give 2 years of his working life that count in neither column.

The 35-year floor in Rejanish may absorb some of this, since a candidate entering regular service in his mid-20s will usually have the 7 years by the time he is eligible on age. But that is an accident of arithmetic, not an answer. The loss that does not get absorbed is seniority - 2 years gone from the promotion list and 2 years off the far end of a career, which is precisely where elevation is decided. The High Courts framing amended rules should settle both questions now, expressly: whether the trainee period counts towards Article 233(2) and whether it counts for seniority on confirmation.

The May 2025 direction was defended as a means of improving the quality of those entering the Bench. This scheme will do the opposite.

The graduate of a national law university choosing between a law firm and the district judiciary is not deterred by an examination; that generation is not afraid of examinations. What deters is 3 lean years - one at the Bar earning next to nothing, then 2 more at half a magistrate’s pay with no rank and no certainty of confirmation. Families weigh these things and say so aloud. The first-generation lawyer weighs them. The woman from a small town weighs them. The candidate with a disability weighs them hardest of all. A bench recruited only from those who can afford to wait is not a more experienced bench; it is a narrower one, drawn from a smaller and more comfortable section of the profession than the one it is meant to serve.

None of this is an argument against training. It is an argument about where training happens.

A judge is made on the dais. Sitting beside a district judge who is hearing live matters, taking small files under supervision, learning how a witness falters, when to grant time and when to refuse it, how an application that looks innocuous is designed to delay: that is training and it has produced generations of competent judges in this country. It cannot be reproduced in a lecture hall and it certainly cannot be reproduced by carrying a High Court judge’s papers for 6 months. Whether the academies can even deliver a residential year for every batch in every State, every year, is a separate and serious doubt. The Judicial Training & Research Institute (JTRI) in Uttar Pradesh and its counterparts elsewhere were built for short induction and refresher courses. They were not built for this and they have not been funded for it.

Appoint the selected candidate as a judicial officer from the date of appointment, with full pay, designation and seniority. Make the first 2 years a period of probation served in the district courts under the High Court’s Article 235 control, with the State Judicial Academy supplying structured instruction alongside the judicial work rather than in place of it. Confirm on satisfactory assessment; discharge where the assessment fails. The Court’s objectives survive intact. Only the demotion disappears.

Justice Vinod Chandran dissented, though from the other direction, preferring that the 2-year requirement at the Bar be left as it stood. And the All India Judges Association mandamus, now more than 3 decades old, has done the district judiciary a great deal of good - better pay, better conditions, a measure of dignity it did not previously enjoy. That is exactly why this particular direction deserves to be revisited rather than absorbed in silence.

Reform should shorten the road to the Bench for the able and the young. It should not lengthen it and then ask them to pay for the privilege of walking it.

VP Singh is an advocate and a former district judge.