Bengaluru, Sept. 11 -- Flagging the delay in the formation of the Arbitration Council of India, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Saturday called for a fundamental recalibration of India's arbitration ecosystem, urging arbitral institutions and practitioners to develop self-regulation rather than await the operationalisation of a statutory regulator.
Speaking at the India ADR Week 2026 organised by the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration, the CJI proposed the creation of a cross-institutional public disclosure register for arbitrators.
"I want to point out an inconvenient fact instead. The law creating a National Regulatory Body for Arbitration, namely, the Arbitration Council of India, was passed in 2019. It has now been more than six years, and that Council still does not exist.
"I do not say this to embarrass anyone. I know the government is working on a fresh Arbitration Bill that could reshape this very institution. I say so because this gathering cannot afford to simply wait for Delhi, in the governmental sense, to decide how the arbitration community should regulate itself," he said.
The CJI said if regulation is intended to strengthen confidence in arbitration, what steps the arbitration community can take on its own to uphold professional standards and inspire that confidence should also be considered, he said.
CJI Kant also highlighted the growing complexity of cross-border arbitration and said that an international dispute should not entail repetitive adjudication of identical or substantially overlapping issues.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.