Last verified: 19 June 2026
In October 2020 a Singapore-seated emergency arbitrator, sitting under the rules of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, ordered the Future group to halt its sale of retail assets to Reliance. Amazon had won an interim order in a matter of days. The problem was what came next. When Amazon tried to enforce that order in India, Future argued that the order was a legal nothing: the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 did not contain the words “emergency arbitrator” anywhere, so the creature that had passed the order did not exist in Indian law.
That single gap produced almost two years of litigation, a trip to the Supreme Court, and a judgment that had to read an emergency arbitrator into Section 17 of a statute that never mentioned one. The Court managed it for India-seated arbitrations, but the episode exposed something larger. India’s arbitration law had been amended in 2015, again in 2019, and again in 2021, yet it was still silent on a procedure that institutions worldwide had treated as routine for a decade. Courts and arbitral institutions kept improvising around the text because the text had not kept up.
The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 is the response to that pattern. Released in draft for public consultation in October 2024, it tries to write into the Act several things that practice had already invented and that courts had been forced to validate case by case: the emergency arbitrator, audio-visual hearings, tighter timelines, and a clearer line between when a court can intervene and when the tribunal takes over. It also proposes something genuinely new and far more contested, an appellate arbitral tribunal that would let parties appeal an award to a second panel of arbitrators rather than to a court.
The catch, and the reason this guide leads with status rather than substance, is that none of this is law. The Bill is a consultation draft. It has not been introduced in Parliament, let alone passed. Headlines that announce “new arbitration rules” are describing proposals, not provisions in force, and a practitioner who redrafts a clause around an unenacted bill is taking a real risk. The 1996 Act, as amended up to 2021, is still the operative statute in every arbitration running in India today.
So this guide does two things. First, it pins down exactly where the Bill stands and how it got here, so you can read any news report against the real legislative position. Second, it walks through each major proposal, what the Act says now, what the draft would change, and where commentators think the draft still falls short, so that when the Bill does move, you already know what is at stake.
The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 is a draft Bill released by the Department of Legal Affairs for public consultation on 18 October 2024. It is not yet law and has not been introduced in Parliament. It proposes statutory recognition of emergency arbitrators (a new Section 9A), an opt-in appellate arbitral tribunal (a new Section 34A), tighter timelines for appointment and jurisdiction, reduced court intervention in interim relief, audio-visual hearings, and a larger role for institutional arbitration and the Arbitration Council of India.
What follows treats every proposal as exactly that, a proposal, and flags the gaps the draft leaves open and the points on which informed commentators disagree.
Where the Bill actually stands right now
Before any discussion of what the Bill would change, the single most important fact is what it is: a draft. Getting this wrong is the most common error in coverage of the 2024 Bill, and it has practical consequences for anyone drafting or arguing a matter this year.
A draft, not law
The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 was published by the Department of Legal Affairs, in the Ministry of Law and Justice, as a consultation draft. It was put out for public comment, not laid before Parliament. As of mid-2026 it has not been introduced as a Bill in either House, has not been referred to a standing committee, and has not received Presidential assent. There is, in other words, no provision of the 2024 Bill in force anywhere in India. Every arbitration currently seated in India is governed by the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 as amended in 2015, 2019 and 2021.
This matters because the gap between a consultation draft and an enacted statute is wide and uncertain. Drafts are revised, narrowed, or shelved. The text that eventually reaches Parliament, if one does, may look materially different from the October 2024 version, and the provisions discussed below should be read as the government’s current thinking rather than the law of tomorrow.
How the consultation unfolded
The draft was released on 18 October 2024 and opened for public comments, with the comment window running into the following weeks and later extended to take in feedback from the bar, arbitral institutions and industry. The consultation drew a substantial and not uniformly enthusiastic response, particularly on the appellate-tribunal proposal. What happens after a consultation of this kind is not fixed: the Department may publish a revised draft, move directly to a Bill for Cabinet approval and introduction, or hold the proposal back. None of those steps had been completed at the time of writing.
The Viswanathan Committee origin and three objectives
The draft did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of the report of an expert committee constituted by the Department of Legal Affairs in June 2023 under the chairmanship of Dr. T.K. Viswanathan, a former Law Secretary and Secretary General of the Lok Sabha, to examine the working of the 1996 Act and recommend reforms. The committee submitted its report on 7 February 2024, and the 2024 draft Bill is the legislative expression of much of its thinking.
Three objectives run through the committee’s report and the draft that followed. The first is to push India decisively toward institutional arbitration and away from the ad hoc model that still dominates domestic practice. The second is to reduce the level of court intervention that has long been arbitration’s biggest credibility problem in India. The third is speed, cutting the time an arbitration takes from start to enforceable award. Almost every individual proposal in the Bill maps onto at least one of these three goals, which is the most useful lens for reading the draft as a whole.
How the 1996 Act got to a fourth reform
To see why a fourth amendment was even on the table, it helps to trace how the Act has been rebuilt in stages, because the 2024 draft is a direct response to what the earlier rounds did and did not fix.
The 1996 foundation
The Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 was India’s adoption of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. It consolidated and modernised a fragmented older regime and was meant to make arbitration a quick, court-light alternative to litigation. For the better part of two decades it did not deliver on that promise. Courts intervened freely at the interim stage, at the appointment stage and at the challenge stage, and awards were routinely stayed for years, so the “alternative” often took as long as a suit.
2015: speed and the auto-stay
The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2015 was the first serious attempt to fix this. It introduced Section 29A, imposing a twelve-month timeline for making an award, extendable by six months by party agreement and beyond that only by a court. It added Section 34(2A), allowing a domestic award to be set aside on the ground of patent illegality appearing on the face of the award. It inserted the Fourth Schedule, a model fee schedule for arbitrators. And it removed the automatic stay of an award merely because a Section 34 challenge had been filed, so that a losing party could no longer freeze enforcement simply by lodging an objection.
2019 and 2021: institutions and the stay pendulum
The 2019 amendment turned toward institution-building. It created the Arbitration Council of India in a new Part IA (Sections 43A to 43M) to grade arbitral institutions and frame norms, and it added confidentiality and arbitrator-immunity provisions. It also brought in the Eighth Schedule, prescribing qualifications for arbitrators, a provision widely criticised for, among other things, appearing to exclude foreign-qualified practitioners. The 2021 amendment then swung the stay pendulum back a little: it allowed an unconditional stay of an award where the arbitration agreement or the award was tainted by fraud or corruption, and it quietly dropped the contentious Eighth Schedule qualification regime.
Why a fourth round
Even after three rounds, structural gaps remained. The Act still said nothing about emergency arbitrators, even as institutional rules and a Supreme Court judgment had made them part of Indian practice. The Arbitration Council of India existed on paper but had not become operational. Court intervention at the interim and challenge stages was reduced but not redesigned. And India’s ambition to become a global arbitration hub, repeatedly stated in policy, sat awkwardly against a statute that lagged the rules of the institutions it hoped to attract. The 2024 draft is the attempt to close those gaps in one pass.
Statutory recognition of the emergency arbitrator (proposed Section 9A)
The emergency arbitrator is the clearest example of the Bill codifying what practice already does, and it is the proposal with the cleanest line back to the Amazon dispute in the opening of this guide.
The gap the Act leaves today
An emergency arbitrator is an arbitrator appointed on an expedited basis, under institutional rules, to grant urgent interim relief before the main tribunal is constituted, often within days of a request. Most major institutional rules provide for one. The 1996 Act does not mention the concept. That silence is what allowed Future to argue that an emergency arbitrator’s order had no statutory footing in India.
The Supreme Court closed part of that gap by interpretation. In Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC v. Future Retail Ltd, (2022) 1 SCC 209 it held that an emergency arbitrator’s order in an arbitration seated in India, conducted under institutional rules the parties had chosen, is an order under Section 17(1) of the Act and is enforceable as such under Section 17(2). That gave emergency relief teeth, but it did so by reading words into a statute that did not contain them, which is precisely the kind of judicial improvisation the Bill is trying to make unnecessary.
What Section 9A and Section 2(1)(ea) would do
The draft Bill proposes to put the emergency arbitrator into the text directly. It would add a definition of “emergency arbitrator” through a new Section 2(1)(ea) and a new Section 9A setting out the framework for appointment and for the relief such an arbitrator may grant, with orders enforceable in the same manner as orders of the tribunal. In substance this codifies the position the Supreme Court reached in Amazon, but it does so cleanly, removing the need for a future party to litigate the very existence of the procedure. For institutional arbitrations seated in India, this would be a confirmation rather than a revolution; its value is certainty.
The foreign-seat gap it does not close
The proposal has a real limit that the draft, on its face, does not cure. Amazon and the proposed Section 9A both concern arbitrations seated in India. For an arbitration seated abroad, the enforcement route is different and narrower. Under the framework set by Bharat Aluminium Co. v. Kaiser Aluminium Technical Services Inc., (2012) 9 SCC 552, Part I of the Act, which contains the interim-relief machinery, does not generally apply to foreign-seated arbitrations. A party that obtains an emergency arbitrator’s order in, say, a Singapore-seated arbitration still cannot enforce that order directly in India as an order; it must usually return to an Indian court under Section 9 for fresh interim relief. The draft’s recognition of emergency arbitrators is, for now, a domestic-seat solution, and cross-border users should not assume it does more than that.
Appellate arbitral tribunals (proposed Section 34A)
If Section 9A is the least controversial proposal, the appellate arbitral tribunal is the most. It is the one genuinely structural innovation in the Bill, and it has drawn the sharpest criticism.
Appeals today: Section 34 and Section 37
Under the current Act, an arbitral award is not appealable on the merits. A party that loses can apply to a court under Section 34 to set the award aside, but only on the narrow grounds listed there, such as incapacity, a defect in the arbitration agreement, denial of a fair hearing, the award exceeding the scope of the reference, or conflict with the public policy of India, plus, for domestic awards, patent illegality under Section 34(2A). An order under Section 34 can then be appealed to a higher court under Section 37. There is deliberately no route to have a second body re-examine the merits of the dispute; finality is the whole point.
How an opt-in appellate tribunal would work
The draft Bill proposes a new Section 34A creating an appellate arbitral tribunal. As drafted, the mechanism is opt-in: parties would have to agree to it, and where they do, an appeal against the award would go to a second arbitral tribunal rather than to a court under Section 34. The appellate tribunal would have power to confirm, modify or set aside the award, including, on the face of the draft, the ability to set aside an award in part rather than as a whole, something a Section 34 court cannot straightforwardly do. Where parties have opted in, the idea is that this internal appeal substitutes for the court challenge, keeping the dispute within the arbitral system for longer.
Why this is the most contested proposal
The criticism comes from several directions at once. The first objection is conceptual: arbitration’s central selling point is finality, and building an appeal into the process risks turning one arbitration into two, adding cost and delay to the very thing the Bill elsewhere tries to speed up. The second is practical: the draft leaves the appointment and constitution of the appellate tribunal, its composition, who appoints it, on what timeline, materially unclear, and an appeal mechanism with uncertain machinery invites exactly the satellite litigation it is meant to avoid. The third concerns the interaction with Section 34: how an opt-in appellate route sits alongside the statutory set-aside jurisdiction, and whether a party can still reach a court afterward, has not been worked out cleanly in the draft. Because of all this, the appellate-tribunal proposal is the part of the Bill most likely to be redesigned or dropped before any enactment, and it is the provision to watch most closely.
Less court, more tribunal: Section 9 and the definition of “court”
A recurring theme of the Bill is shifting work away from courts and onto tribunals and institutions. Two proposals carry most of that load.
Curtailing Section 9 once the tribunal exists
Section 9 currently lets a party approach a court for interim relief before, during or even after arbitral proceedings. In practice parties often run to court under Section 9 even after the tribunal is in place, duplicating the interim-relief power the tribunal already has under Section 17. The draft proposes to curtail recourse to a court under Section 9 once the arbitral tribunal has been constituted, pushing parties to seek interim measures from the tribunal under Section 17 instead. The logic is consistency with the 2015 reform, which had already strengthened Section 17 and discouraged parallel court applications; the draft would harden that into a clearer bar.
Bifurcating the definition of “court”
The draft also proposes to refine the definition of “court” in Section 2(1)(e). The thrust is to bifurcate the forum by type of arbitration, channelling international commercial arbitration to the High Court while domestic matters follow the existing structure. The aim is to route higher-value cross-border disputes to courts with the experience to handle them, in line with the hub ambition behind the whole exercise.
What it means for foreign parties
For a foreign party, these two changes cut in different directions. Routing international commercial arbitration to the High Court is broadly welcome, as it concentrates expertise. But the curtailment of Section 9 deserves attention: combined with the unresolved foreign-seat emergency-arbitrator gap discussed above, a foreign party in an India-related dispute needs to think carefully about when and where it can realistically obtain urgent interim protection, and to time any court application before, rather than after, the tribunal is constituted. The model arbitration clause in a cross-border contract should be drafted with that sequencing in mind; our guide on how to draft an arbitration agreement in India walks through the clause choices that matter here.
Faster timelines and arbitration by screen
Speed is the third of the committee’s objectives, and the Bill attacks delay at the two stages where arbitrations most often stall: getting the tribunal appointed, and resolving challenges to its jurisdiction.
A 60-day clock on appointments (Section 11)
Appointment of arbitrators under Section 11, when the parties cannot agree, has long been a bottleneck, with applications sitting before courts for months. The draft proposes a defined timeline, with the appointment decision to be made within about sixty days, tightening what is today an open-ended process. Read alongside the existing Section 29A clock of twelve months plus six for the award itself, the intent is to compress the whole arbitration from first request to enforceable award.
Jurisdiction as a preliminary issue (Section 16)
Section 16 embodies the principle that a tribunal can rule on its own jurisdiction. The draft proposes to have jurisdictional objections decided as a preliminary issue on a defined timeline, in the region of thirty days, so that a challenge to the tribunal’s authority is resolved up front rather than left to hang over the entire proceeding and resurface at the award stage. Deciding jurisdiction early, if it works as intended, prevents months of evidence being led in a process that a court might later unwind.
Audio-visual hearings written into the Act
The draft also proposes to recognise audio-visual, that is, video-conference, hearings within the statutory definition of arbitration. This formalises a practice that became near-universal after 2020 and that institutional rules already permit, removing any residual argument that a remotely conducted hearing is procedurally irregular. Like the emergency-arbitrator clause, it is the Act catching up to settled practice rather than charting new ground.
Institutional arbitration and the Arbitration Council of India
The first of the committee’s three objectives, moving India toward institutional arbitration, is pursued mainly through changes to how arbitrator fees are set and what role the Arbitration Council of India plays.
Deleting the Fourth Schedule
The 2015 amendment had introduced the Fourth Schedule, a model fee schedule that courts and ad hoc tribunals used as a reference for arbitrator fees. The draft proposes to delete the Fourth Schedule. The thinking is that a single statutory fee grid is a poor fit for a system meant to be driven by institutions, each of which has its own fee rules calibrated to the complexity and value of the dispute.
The ACI’s proposed fee role
In place of the deleted schedule, the draft would have fees determined with reference to the framework set by the Arbitration Council of India, the body created by the 2019 amendment in Part IA. The ACI would, in this design, take on a norm-setting role for fees and for institutional standards more broadly, reinforcing its position as the apex body overseeing the institutional ecosystem the Bill wants to grow.
The catch: the ACI is not yet operational
Here lies the most practical caution in this section. The Arbitration Council of India was created in law in 2019 but has not, as of writing, become fully operational. A reform that leans on the ACI to set fees and standards assumes a functioning institution that does not yet exist in working form. Until the ACI is actually constituted and resourced, deleting the Fourth Schedule without a live replacement framework could leave a gap rather than an upgrade. This is a clear instance where the draft’s ambition runs ahead of the institutional reality on the ground.
The smaller print: interest, seat and the patent illegality debate
Beyond the headline proposals, the draft carries a set of smaller changes that matter to how an award is valued and enforced. Some are clean-ups; one is genuinely unsettled.
Post-award interest pegged to the repo rate
Section 31(7) governs interest on an arbitral award. The draft is reported to propose pegging post-award interest to the Reserve Bank of India’s repo rate plus a margin, with commentators reading the proposed rate as repo plus three per cent, replacing the current default that can run materially higher. If adopted in that form, it would make the cost of a delayed payment more predictable and align it with a transparent benchmark, though the exact figure should be treated as reported rather than settled until the text is final.
Seat, venue and other clean-ups
The draft also tidies several points that courts have had to resolve themselves, broadly in the direction of certainty: clarifying terminology, reflecting the now well-established distinction between the seat of an arbitration, which fixes the supervisory court and the curial law, and a mere venue, which is only the physical location of hearings. These are the kinds of distinctions that decide which court controls an arbitration, and that regularly surface in commercial-contract drafting; they are dealt with in practical terms in our walkthrough of how to redline a commercial contract.
Patent illegality: the unsettled question
One point should be flagged precisely because it is not settled, even among those reading the same draft. The treatment of the patent-illegality ground in Section 34(2A), and in particular whether and how it should apply to awards in international commercial arbitration, is contested, and commentary on the 2024 Bill does not speak with one voice on what the draft does or should do here. This guide deliberately does not assert a direction on that question. Anyone whose matter turns on patent illegality in an international commercial arbitration should treat it as an open issue and track the text closely, rather than rely on a confident summary.
What the draft Bill means for your practice right now
The honest headline for this section is that the Bill changes nothing today, and the most useful advice is about how to position for change without acting on a law that does not exist yet. The right move depends on who you are.
Clause drafting: what to watch, what not to change yet
For transactional lawyers drafting arbitration clauses, the discipline is to draft for the law in force, the 1996 Act as amended to 2021, while keeping the Bill in view. Do not redraft a clause around an unenacted provision; a clause that assumes a statutory appellate tribunal or a particular emergency-arbitrator framework will be built on sand if the Bill changes or stalls. What you can do now is make choices that hold up either way: choose a strong institutional rulebook, specify the seat unambiguously, and let the chosen institution’s rules, rather than a future statute, carry the emergency-arbitrator and procedural machinery. A well-drafted clause is the one piece of this you fully control today.
Interim relief strategy
For litigators, the proposals on Section 9 and emergency arbitrators are a reminder to think about timing now, under current law. The draft signals a future where court-ordered interim relief after the tribunal is constituted becomes harder to obtain, so the prudent habit, already sensible under the present Act, is to secure urgent protection early, through the appropriate forum, and not to assume a court will remain available once the tribunal is in place.
Foreign parties and cross-border deals
For foreign parties and those advising on cross-border M&A and commercial deals, the key takeaway is the gap the Bill does not close: emergency relief in a foreign-seated arbitration still does not enforce directly in India. That should shape both the choice of seat and the interim-relief plan in any India-facing deal. The same forward-but-cautious posture applies to control transactions and other high-value disputes; the dispute-resolution architecture of a deal deserves as much attention as the commercial terms, a point that recurs in transactions such as an open offer under the SEBI Takeover Code.
Students and exam aspirants
For students and judicial-services or competitive-exam aspirants, the cleanest way to hold this material is by the framework, not the section numbers, because the section numbers may move. Learn the three objectives, institutional arbitration, less court intervention, and speed, and be able to place each proposal under one of them, while stating clearly that the Bill is a draft. An answer that confidently presents the 2024 proposals as enacted law is wrong; an answer that frames them as proposals from the Viswanathan Committee draft, and explains the gaps, is right.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 now law?
No. It is a draft Bill released by the Department of Legal Affairs for public consultation on 18 October 2024. As of mid-2026 it has not been introduced in Parliament or enacted, and the operative statute remains the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 as amended in 2015, 2019 and 2021.
What is the Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024?
It is a consultation draft proposing the fourth major round of reforms to India’s arbitration law. It grew out of the expert committee chaired by Dr. T.K. Viswanathan and pursues three objectives: promoting institutional arbitration, reducing court intervention, and speeding up the arbitral process.
What is an emergency arbitrator under the proposed Section 9A?
An emergency arbitrator grants urgent interim relief before the main tribunal is constituted. The draft proposes to recognise the concept directly through a new definition in Section 2(1)(ea) and a framework in a new Section 9A, codifying the position the Supreme Court reached in the Amazon v. Future Retail case for India-seated arbitrations.
What is an appellate arbitral tribunal under the proposed Section 34A?
It is a proposed opt-in second arbitral tribunal that would hear an appeal against an award, with power to confirm, modify or set it aside, in place of a court challenge under Section 34. It is the most contested proposal in the Bill, largely because it sits awkwardly with arbitration’s finality and because its appointment machinery is left unclear in the draft.
How would the Bill change Section 9 interim relief?
It proposes to curtail a party’s ability to approach a court for interim relief under Section 9 once the arbitral tribunal has been constituted, directing parties to seek interim measures from the tribunal under Section 17 instead.
What happens to the model fee schedule (the Fourth Schedule)?
The draft proposes to delete the Fourth Schedule introduced in 2015 and to have arbitrator fees set with reference to the framework of the Arbitration Council of India. The practical caution is that the ACI is not yet fully operational.
Who recommended these arbitration reforms?
The expert committee constituted by the Department of Legal Affairs in June 2023 under Dr. T.K. Viswanathan, which submitted its report on 7 February 2024. The 2024 draft Bill is the legislative expression of much of that report.
When will the Bill come into force?
There is no fixed date. It remains a consultation draft that has not been introduced in Parliament. Until a Bill is introduced, passed by both Houses, and receives Presidential assent, none of its provisions are in force. Verify the current status on the PRS Legislative Research bill tracker and the Department of Legal Affairs website before relying on it.
References
Primary sources
- Department of Legal Affairs, Ministry of Law and Justice, Draft Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 (released for public consultation, 18 October 2024), legalaffairs.gov.in.
- Report of the Expert Committee to examine the working of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, chaired by Dr. T.K. Viswanathan (submitted 7 February 2024).
- PRS Legislative Research, bill tracker for current legislative status, prsindia.org.
Case law
- Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC v. Future Retail Ltd, (2022) 1 SCC 209, recognising an emergency arbitrator’s order in an India-seated arbitration as enforceable under Section 17.
- Bharat Aluminium Co. v. Kaiser Aluminium Technical Services Inc., (2012) 9 SCC 552, holding that Part I of the Act does not generally apply to foreign-seated arbitrations.
Statutes
- Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, as amended by the Amendment Acts of 2015, 2019 and 2021 (the operative statute).
- UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, 1985 (as amended 2006), the basis of the 1996 Act.
Note on currency
The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 is a draft under public consultation as of June 2026 and is not in force. Every proposal described in this article should be read as a proposal, not as enacted law. Always confirm the current legislative position on prsindia.org and legalaffairs.gov.in before acting on it.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 is a draft and not in force; the operative law is the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 as amended to 2021. Readers should verify the current status of the Bill and consult a qualified professional before making decisions based on this content.
