A draft bill that could meaningfully modernise how arbitration works in India has been sitting in consultation limbo for more than two years. Most of what it proposes is genuinely sound. One specific proposal inside it, though, has drawn criticism serious enough that we think it deserves real scrutiny before anyone assumes the whole package is an unambiguous improvement.
The draft Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 emerged from a 16-member expert committee led by T.K. Viswanathan, a former Law Secretary, tasked with reviewing the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 as it stands after amendments in 2015, 2019, and 2021. The committee's report, submitted in February 2024, organised its recommendations around three goals: pushing India toward institutional rather than ad hoc arbitration, reducing the level of court intervention that has long undermined arbitration's core promise of finality, and speeding up the process from start to enforceable award. As of mid-2026, the Bill remains a consultation draft — it has not been introduced in Parliament, and the operative law governing any arbitration today is still the 1996 Act as it currently stands.
The Genuinely Good Proposal: Statutory Recognition for Emergency Arbitrators
Every major arbitral institution's rules already recognise the concept of an emergency arbitrator — someone appointed to grant urgent interim relief before the full tribunal is even constituted. Indian courts have worked around the 1996 Act's silence on this through interpretation, most notably in the Supreme Court's 2021 ruling in Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC v. Future Retail Ltd., which held that an emergency arbitrator's order in an India-seated arbitration was enforceable. The draft Bill's proposed Section 9-A would put this on clear statutory footing, treating emergency arbitrator orders as enforceable in the same way as an established tribunal's interim measures. This closes a real gap and, in our view, is a straightforwardly sensible codification of where the courts had already arrived by interpretation.
The Genuine Shortcoming: It Doesn't Extend to Foreign-Seated Awards
The proposed emergency arbitrator recognition, as currently drafted, doesn't extend to foreign-seated arbitrations — meaning an Indian party relying on an emergency arbitrator's order issued under a foreign seat still faces the same enforceability uncertainty this reform is meant to resolve. For a jurisdiction actively trying to position itself as an attractive, modern arbitration destination, leaving this specific gap open in an otherwise carefully considered reform looks like an incomplete fix rather than a deliberate policy choice, and we'd flag it as the most obvious thing worth correcting before this Bill is finalised.
The Proposal That Concerns Us Most: Reintroducing "Patent Illegality" for International Awards
Here's where we think genuine caution is warranted. Earlier reforms had specifically excluded the "patent illegality" ground — a domestic-award-only basis for court challenge — from applying to international commercial arbitration awards, precisely to give foreign parties greater confidence that arbitrating in India wouldn't expose their award to the same expansive domestic review Indian courts apply to purely domestic disputes. The 2024 draft proposes extending patent illegality to international awards as well. Multiple arbitration practitioners and commentators have flagged this specifically as a step backward, and we agree with that assessment: it directly cuts against the reform package's own stated goal of reducing court intervention and making India a more attractive arbitration seat for cross-border disputes, at precisely the population of awards — international ones — where predictability matters most to the parties choosing where to arbitrate in the first place.
The Experimental Piece: Appellate Arbitral Tribunals
The draft also proposes creating Appellate Arbitral Tribunals — a mechanism to hear challenges to arbitral awards as an alternative to court proceedings, a genuinely novel addition that wasn't actually recommended by the Viswanathan Committee's own report. We'd characterise this the same way several practitioners already have: a bold, somewhat untested idea, whose lack of procedural detail in the current draft leaves real uncertainty about how it would actually interact with existing Section 34 and Section 37 court challenges — worth watching closely as the drafting matures, rather than assuming it will function smoothly on day one.
What This Means for Anyone Drafting Arbitration Clauses Today
Because this remains a draft with no fixed timeline for enactment, arbitration clauses you draft or negotiate today should be built around the current 1996 Act as it stands, not around anticipated future provisions. If your business regularly deals with cross-border contracts, the current uncertainty around the patent illegality proposal is worth watching specifically — should it pass in its current form, seat selection for international arbitration clauses may deserve fresh consideration.