Justice delayed is justice denied. Access to justice for the poor is a constitutional mandate to ensure fair treatment under our legal system. Hence, Lok Adalats were established to make justice accessible and affordable to all. It was a forum to address the problems of crowded case dockets outside the formal adjudicatory system. The first National Lok Adalat of 2021 will be held on April 10. As of now, Lok Adalats have been functioning for 38 years, but have they performed efficiently Do they empower the poor or coerce them to accept unjust compromises Do they trade justice off for high settlement numbers and speed, ignoring the old dictum that justice hurried is justice buried Have we tailored a dual system of justice dispensation, where the formal legal system, i.e, the court, is meant only for the rich and powerful, as was recently stated by former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi These questions are worth consideration. However, besides efficiency and speed, Lok Adalats both online and offline should focus on the quality of justice delivered. The Supreme Court, in State of Punjab vs Jalour Singh, held that a Lok Adalat is purely conciliatory and it has no adjudicatory or judicial function. As compromise is its central idea, there is a concern, and perhaps a valid one, that in the endeavour for speedy disposal of cases, it undermines the idea of justice. In a majority of cases, litigants are pitted against entities with deep pockets, such as insurance companies, banks, electricity boards, among others. In many cases, compromises are imposed on the poor who often have no choice but to accept them. In most cases, such litigs, ants have to accept discounted future values of their claims instead of their just entitlements, or small compensations, just to bring a long-pending legal process to an end. Similarly, poor women under the so-called harmony ideology of the state are virtually dictated by family courts to compromise matrimonial disputes under a romanticised view of marriage. Even a disaster like the Bhopal gas tragedy was coercively settled for a paltry sum, with real justice still eluding thousands of victims.