There is a particular genre of conference speech that has become familiar at arbitration weeks and at every gathering of the international arbitration community where India features on the agenda. Practitioners take the podium and conclude with some variant of the observation that India has tremendous potential but still has work to do. And when the conference ends, very little changes.
The proposition that India can or should become an international arbitration hub is, at its core, a category error. Because, generally speaking, no country has ever been an arbitration hub. London is a hub. Singapore is a hub. Paris is a hub. The DIFC is a hub. More precisely, they offer specific robust arbitration ecosystems defined by a concentration of specialist commercial courts, experienced judges and counsel, credible arbitral institution, financial infrastructure and enforcement architecture all contained within a coherent, navigable legal ecosystem.
Until that distinction is understood by the people shaping India's arbitration landscape, the reform agenda will continue to be built around the wrong question. And a wrong question, however energetically pursued, produces the wrong answer.
I recently read somewhere that the ambition is to make India a top-five arbitral seat by 2030. It deserves to be examined with the same rigour applied to any significant claim. As of today, approximately 2% of respondents in the Queen Mary/White & Case annual survey identify India as a preferred seat. Indian parties routinely rank among the highest volume of foreign users in SIAC's annual caseload. In a recent filing period, Indian parties accounted for 178 of SIAC's 886 new cases, which shows that India is one of the largest exporter of disputes to other arbitration hubs.
Comparing India to other international cities as an arbitration seat is, in any event, analytically incoherent. India is a country of 1.4 billion people, 28 states, multiple High Courts and a Supreme Court managing an appellate caseload that would test any system in the world. These are not comparable units of analysis.
The correct unit of analysis, when discussing arbitration seats, has always been the city. London, not the United Kingdom. Paris, not France. The DIFC, not the UAE. Every leading arbitration seat in the world is defined by specific urban infrastructure, concentrated within one location, built over decades of sustained institutional investment. The question that should be asked and has not been asked with sufficient directness is which Indian city or cities could credibly develop into a serious international seat, over what timeline and with what specific institutional commitments.
Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore are cities that have the commercial concentration, the financial infrastructure and credible institutional presence. Their High Courts have historically demonstrated the most sophisticated commercial jurisprudence. If India is serious about having a preferred seat, the conversation begins with these cities and even then, the work required is generational rather than parliamentary.
The arbitration conversation in India is, overwhelmingly, a Delhi and Mumbai conversation. That is itself part of the problem. Bangalore and Hyderabad hosts some of the most significant technology and commercial activity on the sub-continent. Cities such as Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Pune, Jaipur represent the economic geography of modern India. Any arbitration ecosystem must take root in these cities organically, supported by local institution-building, local mentorship and sustained investment of professional time by senior practitioners who currently have limited incentive to look beyond established markets.
An arbitration culture that exists only in two cities is not a national ecosystem; it is a metropolitan practice with national ambitions. The gap between those two things is where the hub conversation loses contact with commercial reality.
There is another dimension to this problem that receives almost no attention at conferences. Look at the panels. Look at the speaker lists at every major arbitration event where India features. They are composed, almost without exception, of arbitration lawyers speaking to other arbitration lawyers, with the occasional retired judge and institutional representative. The people conspicuously absent are those whose decisions actually determine where disputes go: general counsel, chief legal officers, in-house legal teams and the transactional lawyers who advise on commercial agreements.
This is a profound structural failure of the conversation. The arbitration clause is not drafted by arbitration specialists at a conference. It is drafted, often inadequately and as an afterthought at the end of a long and difficult negotiation by transactional lawyers under time pressure, or by in-house counsel working from a precedent that has not been properly reviewed in years. Defective, inartistic arbitration clauses are not an accident of ignorance alone. They are a product of a professional culture in which the arbitration clause is treated as standard boilerplate rather than as the foundation of the entire dispute resolution architecture that will govern the relationship if things go wrong.
When those clauses fail, the arbitration lawyers who inherit the problem discuss it at conferences, without consistently engaging the transactional and in-house community, whose drafting practices produced it in the first place.
General Counsel must be at these tables. Corporate lawyers advising on mergers, joint ventures, infrastructure projects and government contracts must understand what a properly drafted institutional arbitration clause looks like, what the practical cost of a defective clause is and why the choice of seat and institution matters at the moment of contracting rather than at the moment of dispute. Educating that community systematically, in cities across India, is more consequential than any number of panels at which specialists discuss the state of Indian arbitration amongst themselves.
There is one structural intervention that the conference circuit has not addressed with the directness it deserves. Investment follows predictability. Predictability requires infrastructure. And infrastructure of this quality - specialist court, international judges, rights of audience for foreign counsel, institutional arbitration embedded within a financial centre is what transforms a city from a commercial destination into a dispute resolution seat that parties choose independently of any connection to the jurisdiction. India has taken a step in this direction with GIFT City in Gujarat. The intent behind it is right and it deserves recognition as a serious policy initiative. But intent and execution are different things. There is a need to achieve the institutional depth, judicial infrastructure and international recognition that would place it alongside the DIFC or ADGM as a trusted venue for cross-border dispute resolution.
The most important problem is the cost and time that parties actually spend. A party commencing arbitration in India today faces proceedings that, even where completed efficiently at the arbitral stage, then enter an enforcement process through the court system, offering no certainty of timeline.
The paradox is well-known but insufficiently confronted: arbitration in India exists largely because commercial courts are slow, but its practical utility depends entirely on those same courts at the point where utility matters most: execution of the award. If enforcement cannot be achieved with reasonable predictability, the years of preceding arbitral procedure are, to any sophisticated commercial party, a conditional exercise in managed uncertainty rather than a reliable path to a remedy.
But there is a deeper structural problem that receives almost no attention: the number of procedural layers available to a party wishing to resist an award. A losing party in Indian arbitration may challenge under Section 34, appeal under Section 37, file a Special Leave Petition before the Supreme Court and, in exceptional cases, pursue further recourse thereafter. This architecture was not designed for finality. It has, through accumulated procedural layers, reproduced precisely the litigation culture that arbitration was introduced to escape. The reform is not difficult to identify, even if politically demanding to implement: a challenge at Section 34, with a direct path to the Supreme Court thereafter and nothing in between. Every additional layer is a structural invitation to delay. And delay at this stage is not a procedural inconvenience; it is a substantive denial of the remedy the successful party has already earned through years of proceedings.
Equally important, and consistently underemphasised, is the question of cost consequences. In the DIFC Courts, costs follow the event as a matter of default principle. A party contemplating a challenge to an arbitral award does so knowing that an unsuccessful challenge carries the real financial consequence of paying the other side's legal costs. The deterrent effect on unmeritorious challenges is significant and operates at the point of decision rather than at the end of further years of proceedings. Indian courts have the power to award costs. Exercising that power consistently, and at a level that reflects actual expenditure, would change the advisory conversation between counsel and client in ways that no legislative amendment has achieved. It would make the decision to challenge an award a genuinely considered commercial decision rather than a default response to an adverse outcome.
The question of who arbitrates in India is inseparable from the question of what Indian arbitration becomes. The current landscape - dominated by retired judges appointed through a professional culture that has historically preferred judicial familiarity to specialist expertise - is a product of incentive structures, not individual failures. Change the institutional environment and the appointments will follow.
But that change requires active investment by the senior practitioners who currently have the most influence over how the next generation develops. Mentoring younger arbitrators, appointing them in appropriate cases, building structured pipelines within institutions, creating professional groups in cities beyond Delhi and Mumbai: this is the work that builds an ecosystem. It is slow, unglamorous and largely invisible at conferences. It is also the work that actually matters for the long term.
The arbitration hub conversation will remain a category error until India addresses - with seriousness and sustained commitment - a specific set of reforms that are not yet at the centre of the debate.
Reframe the question entirely. The goal is not to make India a hub; the goal is to make Mumbai or Delhi and, over time, other Indian cities into seats that Indian parties choose first and that international parties choose on the merits.
Streamline the challenge architecture. A challenge at Section 34, a direct path to the Supreme Court and nothing in between. Finality must mean something for the system to command confidence.
Build financial centres that contain a robust arbitration ecosystem modelled on what the DIFC and ADGM have actually built, with the patience and commitment that project required.
Make costs follow the event, fully and consistently, at every level where an unmeritorious challenge is dismissed. Change the financial calculus of the challenge decision.
Bring general counsel and corporate lawyers into the conversation. The professionals who draft the arbitration clause must understand what they are building. Appoint general counsel and professionals as arbitrators in appropriate cases.
None of this is to suggest that India has stood still. It has not. The legislative journey since 1996, the recalibration of judicial approach post-2012, the emergence of credible institutions and the quality of a new generation of Indian practitioners appearing in international proceedings represent genuine and hard-won progress. The criticism at conferences is sometimes warranted. But progress and destination are different things, and conflating them does no service to either. Infrastructure, enforceability and predictability are what make a seat. And sustained, honest, commitment to building what international commerce actually requires rather than announcing what international audiences might wish to hear, is what makes the difference between an ecosystem that functions and a conversation that simply continues.
The hub conversation has been going on for over a decade. It is time to retire it and replace it with something more honest and considerably more useful. Before becoming an international arbitration hub, India needs to become the first choice for its own parties.
Tariq Khan is a counsel and arbitrator based in Dubai, practising in the DIFC and ADGM Courts with a focus on cross-border commercial disputes.