New ways to settle disputes

It shouldn’t be any surprise that the government and the judiciary are on the same page on creating a vibrant dispute resolution ecosystem. Prime Minister Narendra Modi feels the speedy resolution of commercial disputes will act to facilitate the ease of doing business, in which index India scores a poor 130 of 189 nations. The Chief Justice of India is, however, more concerned with the burden of cases on courts, which are so phenomenal in number that by one calculation it would take 300 years to clear the backlog only in the Supreme Court and high courts. Both views are pertinent to a huge problem: the need for speedy justice delivery and dispute resolution.

An alternative dispute resolution system with arbitration, mediation and conciliation to resolve commercial disputes has much to commend itself. A whole new mindset will be needed, of course, if litigants are to accept the findings of such an alternative system. It will be self-defeating if, as it now happens in most commercial arbitration cases, the adversaries simply refuse to accept the decisions and go back to a civil court.

The ideal solution lies in future: not only will the system have to train professional arbitrators to settle disputes but also pass legislation to lend the weight of law to their rulings. When the judiciary and the government are at loggerheads over judges’ appointments to fill the many vacancies in the high courts and elsewhere, such commonality of purpose on an alternate dispute resolution system should be welcomed. Will the two major arms of governance speed up this process