Former Orissa High Court Chief Justice and Senior Advocate Dr S Muralidhar urged India to stop benchmarking itself against London, Singapore or Paris and instead fix the fundamentals of its domestic arbitration - in terms of specialisation, time discipline and enforcement -before pitching to be an international hub.
The former judge's core thesis was blunt: India keeps asking how to become an attractive seat even as basic structural gaps persist.
“If we solve the problems of our domestic arbitration, we will then be able to solve the problems of our hankering for international arbitration,” he said, noting that the theme has been “analysed threadbare” across conferences without addressing first principles.
“Let’s get our house in order. Then other things will follow," he said.
He was speaking at Delhi Arbitration Week 2025 during a session titled Seats of the Future: Actionable steps for enhancing the Indian Arbitration Ecosystem. The session was chaired by Supreme Court Justice BV Nagarathna and featured Gujarat High Court Justice Nikhil S Kariel, Justice Michael Black KC and David Quest KC.
Justice Muralidhar noted that India’s Bar and Bench are set up for generalism, not specialism. The same top counsel handle criminal appeals by day and complex international commercial arbitration by evening. Judges rotate across bail lists, matrimonial matters and arbitration in quick succession, he noted.
“We expect our good practitioners and our good judges to be generalists and not specialists,” he observed, adding that arbitration demands exclusive time and focus that India’s current rhythms struggle to provide.
He contrasted this with institutional practice at bodies like ICC and SIAC, where arbitrators and counsel typically clear their boards and devote uninterrupted attention to a single case. By comparison, he said, India tries to run arbitration “in a closed space” after court hours, “which many of us are finding impossible to do.” The result is an appetite for a “premium arbitration lounge” without first building the specialist capacity it requires, he said.
Justice Muralidhar observed that creating “commercial courts” was meant to fast-track disputes, but rotating assignments between judges meant benches aren’t truly specialist.
“So the judge cannot be a specialist. So that commercial court…is not a permanent court,” he said, calling for stable specialist benches and a specialised arbitration Bar as prerequisites for credibility.
The former judge cautioned against copy-pasting foreign arbitration models into Indian conditions.
“It cannot work ipso facto in India. We have to indigenise. We have to customise whatever we’ve borrowed for the Indian system,” he said, noting that those frameworks are devised for systems “where they value time and costs” and enforce strict no-adjournment cultures.
"Here, we give adjournments because the lawyer's daughter has got a plus two examination the next day."
On enforcement, he flagged a recurring mindset when foreign awards land in Indian courts, especially against the State or PSUs.
“All that the lawyer has to stand up and say [is], ‘my lord, a ₹2,000-crore award, a $2-billion award...Just the figure from 2,000 crores to 2 billion means, okay, my antenna should be up. I should scrutinise it even more carefully. So the whole approach then becomes very different, because we're dealing with a whole other kind of litigation. We are not oriented specially to deal with arbitration kind of disputes, particularly international and foreign awards."