अर्बिट्रेशन काउंसिल ऑफ इंडिया क्यों नहीं बन पाई?

Why Arbitration Council Of India Still Not Taken Off?

Joel Kenneth Johnson

22 Sept 2026 11:00 AM IST

In February 2026, the Government told Parliament what the arbitration bar already knew: the Arbitration Council of India has not been constituted as yet. The admission was brief, almost routine. It should not have been. Parliament wrote the Council into the statute book in 2019, gave it a head office in Delhi and a mandate to shape the future of Indian arbitration, and then left the chair empty for close to seven years. India has spent that time announcing its ambition to become a global arbitration hub. The body it designed to lead that project has never met.

The Council was not an afterthought. It comes from the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, as amended in 2019, which inserted a new Part IA and Sections 43A to 43M to create a seven-member body chaired by a former judge or an arbitration expert, appointed in consultation with the Chief Justice of India. The design followed the 2017 report of the High-Level Committee under Justice B.N. Srikrishna, which had named the real weakness in Indian arbitration. The problem was not the law. It was the shortage of credible institutions. Parties fell back on ad hoc arbitration because they did not trust domestic institutions to run a case well. The Council was meant to cure that from the top: to grade arbitral institutions, to recognise the bodies that accredit arbitrators, to run training, and to advise the Government on policy. It was to be the regulator that made institutional arbitration worth choosing.

For a party, none of that is bureaucracy. A grade would tell a company choosing between two institutions which one meets a tested standard. An accreditation would tell it something about the arbitrator who will decide its dispute. A public depository of awards would let the whole system learn from what tribunals actually do. These are the ordinary furnishings of a trusted arbitral seat, and India legislated for all of them in 2019.

The ambition has been restated at every turn. The 1996 Act was amended in 2015, again in 2019, and again in 2021, each time with the stated aim of shorter timelines, fewer trips to court, and an India that foreign parties would pick as a seat. The Government has repeated the goal from public platforms. Yet the one institution meant to carry the reform from statute into practice was never switched on. That is the distance between legislating a hub and building one.

The selectiveness is telling. In the same season of reform, Parliament created a different arbitration body by statute, the India International Arbitration Centre, and the Government has since steered large public-sector enterprises to name it in their contracts. The State, then, could stand up an arbitral institution when it chose to. What it did not stand up was the regulator meant to hold every institution, that Centre included, to a common standard. The hub was given a flagship and denied a rule maker.

A vacuum with consequences

The cost of the gap is not abstract. Take arbitrator accreditation. The 2019 amendment had tied it to a rigid Eighth Schedule, criticised for shutting out foreign-qualified arbitrators and much else. The 2021 amendment removed the Schedule and rewrote Section 43J to say that the qualifications, experience and norms for accreditation shall be such as the regulations specify. The regulations, though, are the Council's to make. With no Council, there are no regulations, and so there is no accreditation framework at all. A reform meant to professionalise the pool of arbitrators has produced, for now, a blank. An arbitrator may call himself accredited, and no one can say by what standard, because the standard was left to a body that does not sit.

Take institutional standards. While the Council waited to exist, institutional arbitration grew without it. Some of that growth is healthy, as established centres wrote careful rules of their own. Some of it is not, and the point is now before the Supreme Court. In Anil Kalyandas Thanvi v. Union of India, the Court has issued notice on a petition which says that a trade association administers arbitrations under its own rules, with no external body to test whether those rules meet any common standard, and which asks the Court to direct the Council's establishment. The petition puts the vacuum in concrete terms. When an institution writes rules that favour itself, there is at present no grader, no benchmark and no recourse short of the constitutional court. That is the space the Council was built to fill. The Cotton Association is only the dispute that reached the Court; the same question, who checks the checker, hangs over every institution that writes its own rules and then sits in judgment under them.

The paradox is that the law keeps leaning on a body that does not exist, even as it edges away from what that body was meant to do. The draft Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024, released for public consultation on an expert committee's recommendations, again hands functions to a working Council, yet in freeing arbitral institutions to run their own affairs it steps back from the very grading role the Council was built to perform. Fresh reform is being drafted around a regulator that has never been appointed, and around a mandate its own drafters seem no longer sure they want. It is little wonder that the Chief Justice of India recently described the Council's continued non-constitution as part of a credibility gap in India's arbitration project. His warning carried a hard number: Indian parties remain among the largest foreign users of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, taking their disputes to a seat they already trust. A seat that legislates institutions and then does not build them invites the very doubt a hub cannot afford.

Constitute it, or let it go

Two answers to the delay are usually offered, and both dodge the harder question. The first is that the Government has been slow and needs to appoint the members. The second is that the ground has shifted so far since 2019 that the Council, as designed, may no longer be the right vehicle. There is force in the second. A central grader of institutions and gatekeeper of arbitrators sits at odds with a 2024 Bill that wants to empower institutions and keep courts at a distance. But the honest response to that tension is a decision, not a vacuum. If the Council is still wanted, it should be constituted with a mandate rewritten for the arbitration landscape of 2026: lighter on gatekeeping, firmer on grading, transparency and the depository of awards, and independent enough to be believed. If it is not wanted, its functions should be moved, in plain terms, to a body that exists. What cannot be defended is the present state, in which the Council is real enough to be assigned work and unreal enough to do none of it.

India's case for being an arbitration hub rests on a simple promise, that a party who chooses India will find a system that is quick, fair and well run. Much of the legislative work behind that promise is done. The Act has been amended three times, the institutions are improving, and the courts speak more and more of arbitration as a first choice rather than a last resort. The seats India measures itself against are trusted because their institutions are trusted, and that trust is built, not announced. What is missing is the keystone the design placed at the centre and never set. Seven years is long enough to decide whether the Arbitration Council of India is to lead the reform or to be retired. Leaving the chair empty decides nothing, and it tells the world more about our seriousness than any amendment does.

Author is an advocate practicing at Supreme Court of India and various High Courts. Views are personal.

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