India is running two expensive, decade-scale reforms of commercial dispute resolution at the same time, and largely treating them as though they have nothing to do with each other.
The first is a push to make ordinary commercial litigation fast. A draft Commercial Courts (Amendment) Bill, first put out for public comments in 2024 and still pending, proposes to widen the use of summary judgment so more disputes can be decided without a full trial, make e-filing and virtual hearings the default rather than the exception, and compress timelines: cutting the time for pronouncing judgment from ninety to sixty days after arguments close, requiring injunction applications to be resolved within ninety days (thirty, if interim relief is granted without notice), and directing execution proceedings to conclude within a year of filing. The stated purpose is to give a plaintiff in an ordinary commercial court something close to what arbitration has long promised: a decision without a decade of adjournments.
The second is the decade-old effort to make India an arbitration hub. The India International Arbitration Centre, arbitration centres attached to the Delhi and Gujarat High Courts, and the push to develop GIFT City as a seat are all part of an official bet that arbitration, not litigation, is where India’s commercial dispute resolution reputation will be built. Alongside this sits a draft Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024, which proposes Appellate Arbitral Tribunals to hear challenges to awards, formal recognition of emergency arbitration, stricter timelines for passing awards, and a narrower role for courts in granting interim relief under Section 9. Restricting court intervention at the interim-relief stage, in particular, could cut both ways for parties who genuinely need urgent protection before a tribunal is even in place.
Both reforms promise speed. Nobody has asked whether they are quietly working against each other.
Start with the commercial incentive to arbitrate at all. If an ordinary commercial court genuinely delivers a reasoned judgment within months rather than years, the case for writing an arbitration clause into a routine domestic contract gets weaker for a large slice of disputants: court litigation costs less, comes with a real right of appeal, and no longer carries the old stigma of endless delay. Arbitration was never meant to compete with a functioning court system; it was meant to be the escape route from a dysfunctional one. Fix the court, and the escape route loses some of its appeal.
The relationship runs the other way too, and this is the more serious problem. Arbitration’s promise of minimal court interference is not self-contained. Interim relief before a tribunal is even constituted still runs through Section 9. Challenges to an award still run through Section 34, appeals through Section 37, and enforcement, the only part of arbitration that actually puts money in a winning party’s hands, still runs through Section 36, in the same district and commercial courts the litigation reform is trying to fix. An arbitration hub that quietly depends on an overstretched judiciary for enforcement is not actually independent of commercial court reform. It needs that reform to succeed just as much as ordinary litigants do.
The Supreme Court made this point starkly, if only orally, when it observed that India cannot aspire to be an international arbitration hub if arbitral awards go unenforced, in a dispute over the multi-thousand-crore Delhi Airport Metro Express award. An arbitration-friendly statute on paper means little if the enforcement machinery behind it is the same slow one the reform was meant to bypass.
The Same Judge, Two Reforms, Five Months Apart
The clearest sign that these two tracks are not talking to each other comes from the bench, not the bar.
On 28 February 2026, at the inauguration of the new Gujarat High Court Arbitration Centre, Chief Justice Surya Kant described institutional arbitration in India as being at the crossroads. He said that legislative amendments and judicial pronouncements strengthening party autonomy have not, on their own, been enough to make India a preferred arbitration destination. Physical and digital infrastructure, he said, is what actually builds institutional credibility.
Five months later, on 10 August 2026, a bench led by the same Chief Justice was hearing a rather different-sounding matter: a petition by the Indian Commercial and Arbitration Bar Association asking the Court to call for updated data on commercial litigation nationwide, to assess whether more commercial courts are needed, because the existing ones lack adequate infrastructure and commercial appellate benches. The petition traces back to 2023, and the Court has been chasing compliance data from the States since.
Two hearings, five months apart, before the same Chief Justice, surfaced the identical underlying complaint: courts and tribunals short of the infrastructure needed to work at the speed the law now expects of them, in two conversations that show no visible sign of being connected to each other.
The legislative track shows the same pattern. In ASF Buildtech Private Limited v. Shapoorji Pallonji and Company Private Limited, the Supreme Court criticised the draft Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 for still not giving arbitral tribunals express statutory power to implead non-signatory parties, and urged the Department of Legal Affairs to fix the gap while the Bill was still under consideration. That was in 2025. Through much of 2026, the Bill continued to be described in practitioner commentary as a draft still awaiting introduction. A bill the Court itself has asked the government to improve, sitting unmoved for over a year, is not evidence of two reform tracks moving at the same pace, or even in step.
Even where the law already promises the kind of speed the commercial courts reform is chasing, the record is not encouraging. The ninety-day timeline for resolving payment disputes under Section 18 of the MSMED Act, the fastest statutory dispute mechanism India has for a large category of commercial claims, has been pushed to the background once cases enter a system already carrying years of pendency. If a narrower, administratively simpler fast-track has struggled against ordinary caseloads, a sixty-day judgment timeline and a ninety-day injunction timeline for the far larger universe of commercial court litigation will need more than a Bill to survive contact with the same caseloads.
There is also a distributional point worth making plainly. Institutional arbitration, as currently designed, is built around high-value, often cross-border disputes that can absorb arbitrator fees and institutional charges running into lakhs of rupees before the first hearing. Most commercial disputants in India, particularly smaller companies and MSMEs whose payment claims are the bulk of what actually clogs the system, are never going to arbitrate at all. For them, the commercial courts are not a competing track; they are the only track. A reform agenda that spends more visible political and legislative energy on Appellate Arbitral Tribunals and international seats than on the district-level infrastructure that decides most disputes has its priorities upside down relative to who is actually waiting for a hearing date.
None of this is an argument against either reform. Faster commercial courts and a credible arbitration ecosystem are both worth having, and neither is a substitute for the other: some disputes genuinely need the confidentiality and party-chosen expertise that arbitration offers, regardless of how fast the courts get. But the two are being built as though they draw on separate resources, when in fact they draw on the same finite pool of judges, registry staff and digital infrastructure, and ultimately on the same district and commercial courtrooms that both enforce arbitral awards and decide the litigation the reform is meant to speed up. Two Bills, two consultation processes, two sets of advocacy groups, and one Chief Justice repeating the same diagnosis five months apart, is not a coordinated dispute-resolution strategy. It is two fast lanes built to feed into the same bottleneck.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of FoEJ Media.
