CJI Flags Delay in Creation of Arbitration Council of India

Speaking at the Indian Institute of Arbitration and Mediation silver jubilee event, CJI Kant stressed that India is moving towards treating alternative dispute redressal (ADR) not as a lesser substitute for justice but as one of its ordinary pathways.

He said the Arbitration Council of India was created on the statute book by the 2019 amendment to grade institutions and accredit arbitrators.

"Six years later, it has still not been constituted. A further Draft Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, circulated for public consultation in October 2024 on the recommendations of the Viswanathan Committee, remains exactly that, and its new avatar is hopefully now being introduced in Parliament.

"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 said, noting that credibility is not built by judgments alone.

The courts remain indispensable guardians of rights but with more than five crore cases pending, the backlog has to be met partly outside the courtroom, the CJI said.

He said the single underlying purpose of arbitration, mediation and digital dispute resolution is to build an architecture of trust that allows disputing parties to believe that a fair, timely and enforceable resolution is available to them outside the traditional courtroom.

The CJI was speaking on the theme: "Reimagining ADR: Innovation, Technology and the Future of Justice".

"Courts undoubtedly remain indispensable guardians of rights that cannot be bargained away. But not every dispute needs a judicial verdict. Many need only to be properly understood and harmonised.

"It is, therefore, encouraging that India is moving, however unevenly, towards treating ADR not as a lesser substitute for justice but as one of its ordinary pathways and a reliable pillar.

"The scale of the problem is worth stating plainly. Indian courts currently carry more than five crore cases, at least half of which are the actual arrears, mostly pending in our district and trial courts.

"Government departments and public bodies are, by most estimates, party to roughly half of that docket. A fifth of all pending cases concern land and property disputes, that frequently outlive the original litigants," he said.

The CJI said 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.

CJI Kant said the modern justice ecosystem now includes arbitration centres, mediation institutions, online dispute resolution platforms, community mediation and hybrid processes.

"None of this competes with courts, but still relieves them of disputes that do not need a judicial dictum for being resolved. This complementary process saves judicial time to be spent only where a reasoned judgment is the last resort," he said.

The CJI said the road ahead for the mediation movement in India depends on three things -- the professionalisation of mediator training and accreditation, corporate India's willingness to draft mediation clauses in their business agreements with the same seriousness as it drafts arbitration clauses; and India's actual ratification of the Singapore Convention on Mediation.