Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant on Saturday delivered a candid assessment of India’s arbitration landscape, warning that the country’s ambition of becoming a preferred global arbitration seat would remain elusive unless it bridges the gap between legislative intent and institutional implementation.
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Highlighting what he described as a “credibility deficit”, the CJI pointed to the continued non-constitution of the Arbitration Council of India (ACI), despite its creation through the 2019 amendments to the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, and the long-pending draft legislation proposing the next round of reforms.
“The Arbitration Council of India was created on statute-book by the 2019 amendment to grade institutions and acted,” said the CJI while delivering the inaugural address at the Silver Jubilee celebrations of the Indian Institute of Arbitration and Mediation (IIAM) in New Delhi.
Referring to the Draft Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, first circulated for public consultation in October 2024 on the recommendations of the TK Viswanathan Committee and now expected to be introduced in Parliament, Justice Kant said legislation alone cannot build confidence in India’s arbitration ecosystem.
“If our ambition is to become a preferred seat, this gap between announcement and implementation is precisely the credibility deficit we cannot legislate our way out of,” he remarked.
The Draft Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill seeks to deepen institutional arbitration by reducing judicial intervention, recognising emergency arbitration, streamlining timelines, clarifying the distinction between the seat and venue of arbitration and introducing several procedural reforms based on the recommendations of the expert committee headed by former law secretary Viswanathan. The Union law ministry had invited public comments on the draft in October 2024, describing the exercise as part of its effort to strengthen institutional arbitration and improve ease of doing business.
The CJI underscored that the reforms acquire added urgency given the burden on the conventional justice delivery system. “Indian courts currently carry more than five crore (50 million) cases…No adjudicatory model, however well-resourced, resolves a backlog of that scale on its own. It has to be met partly outside the courtroom, not as a matter of convenience, but as a matter of arithmetic,” said Justice Kant, stressing that arbitration, mediation and online dispute resolution have become indispensable complements to the judicial system rather than alternatives to it.
He also drew attention to India’s continued dependence on foreign arbitral institutions despite its growing commercial economy. “There is a more uncomfortable statistic worth placing before this audience. In both 2024 and 2025, Indian parties were the third-largest foreign users of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre,” the judge noted.
Calling it a question of institutional credibility rather than a criticism of Singapore, the CJI observed that Indian businesses continue to export their commercial disputes to jurisdictions that have earned trust through decades of consistent institutional practice.
“We are, in other words, among the world’s most enthusiastic exporters of our own commercial disputes to a seat we do not control, governed frequently by a law we did not write,” said the CJI, adding that Singapore’s success rested on “decades of consistent practice, fairness and impartiality.”
Posing what he described as the central challenge before India’s arbitration ecosystem, the CJI asked: “What would it take for the next generation of Indian companies to choose Mumbai or Delhi with the same confidence they currently reserve for Singapore?”
He urged stakeholders to focus not on cataloguing deficiencies in Indian arbitration in the abstract but on identifying concrete institutional reforms that would make “credibility, rather than habit or convenience”, the reason parties choose India as the seat of arbitration.
