For most of India's post-liberalisation history, arbitration meant ad hoc arbitration two parties, a retired judge or two as arbitrators, and a process that often ran longer and cost more than the litigation it was meant to avoid. That reputation has been slow to shake off, but the underlying practice has shifted considerably, and largely away from the public eye.
Why Ad Hoc Arbitration Fell Out of Favour
Ad hoc arbitration places the entire administrative burden appointing arbitrators, fixing venues, managing timelines, handling fee disputes on the parties and the tribunal itself. In a system without a strong institutional backstop, this created space for delay tactics, procedural wrangling, and arbitrators who, understandably, modelled arbitration on the very court procedures parties were trying to escape. The 246th Law Commission Report (2014) and the subsequent Srikrishna Committee Report (2017) both flagged this as a structural weakness, recommending a shift toward institutional arbitration on the model of the SIAC, ICC, and LCIA.
What Changed
The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2019 attempted to operationalise this shift by establishing the Arbitration Council of India, intended to grade and accredit arbitral institutions. Progress on that specific body has been slower than hoped, but the market moved anyway. Domestic institutions the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration (MCIA), the Delhi International Arbitration Centre (DIAC, now reconstituted), and a growing number of university and industry-linked arbitration centres have built out panels, model clauses, and case management infrastructure that ad hoc arbitration simply cannot replicate.
Equally significant has been the courts' own posture. Judgments narrowing the scope for interference under Section 34 and Section 37 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, along with the Supreme Court's consistent (if not always perfectly consistent) endorsement of minimal curial intervention, have made institutional awards more attractive to draft toward parties want the finality that institutional rules and disciplined timelines can deliver, and that predictability is worth paying an administrative fee for.
The Student and Young Professional Angle
For law students, this shift matters beyond academic interest. Institutional arbitration has created an entirely new career track not just as counsel, but as case managers, tribunal secretaries, and researchers within the institutions themselves. Moot court experience translates more directly into this ecosystem than it does into most other litigation-adjacent fields, and several institutions now run internship and young-professional programmes specifically to build a pipeline into arbitration practice.
What Still Holds India Back
None of this means the job is done. Enforcement of foreign awards under Part II of the Act remains inconsistent across jurisdictions within India, arbitrator fee schedules are still opaque compared to Singapore or London, and the pool of Indian-qualified arbitrators with genuine international commercial experience remains thin relative to demand. The Arbitration Council of India's slow rollout has also meant that "institutional" quality varies enormously between a handful of well-resourced centres and dozens of smaller, less tested ones.
Where This Leaves Things
India is not yet a default seat for cross-border commercial arbitration the way Singapore or Paris are, but the direction of travel is clear, and it has been sustained across multiple governments and multiple Law Commission reports a rare degree of policy continuity in Indian legal reform. For students entering the field now, the more useful question is not whether institutional arbitration will keep growing, but which institution, and which practice area within it, to specialise in early.