Former Orissa HC Chief Justice Dr S Muralidhar at DAW 2025 urged India to prioritise domestic arbitration reforms, specialist benches, and efficient enforcement before aspiring to be a global arbitration hub. He highlighted that structural gaps must be addressed first, rather than copying foreign models.
New Delhi: Former Orissa High Court Chief Justice and Senior Advocate Dr S Muralidhar has called for India to stop comparing itself with international arbitration hubs like London, Singapore, or Paris and instead focus on strengthening its domestic arbitration system.
Speaking at Delhi Arbitration Week 2025, he emphasised that India should fix its foundational issues before aiming to attract international arbitration cases.
The former judge was direct in his assessment, noting that India continues to ask how to become an attractive seat for arbitration while basic structural gaps remain unresolved.
He said,
“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 further pointed out that the issue has been discussed extensively at conferences but fundamental first principles are still largely ignored.
He added,
“Let’s get our house in order. Then other things will follow,”
Dr Muralidhar delivered these remarks during a session titled Seats of the Future: Actionable Steps for Enhancing the Indian Arbitration Ecosystem, which was chaired by Supreme Court Justice BV Nagarathna.
The panel also featured Gujarat High Court Justice Nikhil S Kariel, along with prominent international legal experts Justice Michael Black KC and David Quest KC.
Highlighting the structural challenges in India, Justice Muralidhar said that both the Bar and Bench are designed for general practice rather than specialised work.
“We expect our good practitioners and our good judges to be generalists and not specialists,”
he observed.
He explained that many top lawyers handle criminal appeals during the day and complex international commercial arbitration cases in the evening. Similarly, judges rotate rapidly across various lists, including bail matters, matrimonial cases, and arbitration disputes.
According to him, arbitration requires dedicated focus and uninterrupted attention—something that India’s current judicial and legal practices struggle to provide.
He contrasted this with established institutional practices at organisations like the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC), where arbitrators and counsel often clear their schedules and devote full attention to a single matter.
By comparison, India tries to manage arbitration “in a closed space” after normal court hours, “which many of us are finding impossible to do.”
The result, he said, is a demand for a “premium arbitration lounge” without first developing the specialist capacity that such a system demands.
Dr Muralidhar also raised concerns about the effectiveness of commercial courts. While the creation of commercial courts was intended to fast-track disputes, the frequent rotation of judges means that benches do not develop true specialisation.
“So the judge cannot be a specialist. So that commercial court…is not a permanent court,”
he noted.
He emphasised the need for stable, specialist benches and a specialised arbitration Bar as essential requirements to establish credibility in the arbitration space.
Cautioning against simply copying foreign arbitration models, Dr Muralidhar stressed that these frameworks must be adapted to 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, highlighting that international models operate in 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.”
He also discussed challenges in enforcing foreign awards, particularly against the State or public sector undertakings.
“All that the lawyer has to stand up and say [is], ‘my lord, a Rs 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.”
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Justice Muralidhar’s observations highlight the pressing need for India to strengthen its domestic arbitration framework, develop specialist judges and lawyers, and create a more disciplined and enforceable system before positioning itself as a global arbitration hub.
His remarks come amid ongoing discussions about making India a preferred seat for international arbitration, reflecting the broader legal community’s recognition of gaps in current practices.
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