माध्यस्थम्, सुलह तथा वैकल्पिक विवाद निवारण विधि [LAW OF ARBITRATION, CONCILIATION & ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION]

Description

There is no doubt that the practical application and enforcement of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act over the past two decades has developed a smooth, simple, and healthy alternative system for the swift resolution of disputes in India, whose greatest achievement is that it has provided substantial help in reducing the burden on courts as well as reducing delays in the legal process.

The main purpose of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act of 1996 was to ensure the autonomy of parties through arbitration and conciliation proceedings while keeping judicial intervention to a minimum as far as possible and to encourage institutional arbitration. However, from the implementation of the Act over the following years, it was felt that certain shortcomings still existed. To remedy these, the Government of India prepared the Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill in 2003 and invited suggestions on it from relevant institutions, jurists, legal experts, and commercial businesspeople and entrepreneurs, so that after consideration, the Act could be passed in an amended form. However, for various reasons this bill remained pending in Parliament for years. It was reintroduced in Parliament in amended form in May 2015, and was eventually passed as the Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2015 (No. 3 of 2016), coming into force on 23 October 2015.

Despite the 2015 amendment Act coming into force, with the aim of making it more effective, certain provisions of the original Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 were further refined and improved in 2019, so that India could be established internationally as a developed arbitration hub, and so that domestic and international businesses and companies would be drawn to India to resolve their commercial disputes. One objective of this amendment Act was also to develop the arbitration system into a time-bound and less costly mechanism.

Thereafter, arbitration law was further amended in 2021, the focus of which was to completely eliminate fraud and corruption in arbitration proceedings and process, developing it into a clean and professional system.

Despite all the above amendments, legal practitioners, judges, advocates, arbitration experts, and other relevant stakeholders had, over the past decades, felt the need for a separate and independent mediation law. Giving serious consideration to this, the Central Government got the Mediation Act, 2023 passed in Parliament in 2023, which came into force on 9 October 2023. As a result of the passing of this Act, all conciliation proceedings that were conducted under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 will now be understood as references to mediation under the Mediation Act, 2023. Hence, “conciliation” and “mediation” can now be used interchangeably, so that the process followed for resolving civil, commercial, family, and international disputes may be simple and convenient for stakeholders.

An effort has been made to incorporate all these amendments and changes made to arbitration law in their proper places in this edition of the book, so as to present this work in an updated form.

Keeping in mind readers’ special interest in this book, the author has made every effort, in this eighth edition, to incorporate all the latest decided cases relating to arbitration and conciliation law in their proper places, making the subject matter clearer and more comprehensible. At present, special emphasis is being placed on adopting alternative methods besides the arbitration and conciliation mechanism for the swift resolution of disputes, so that disputes arising from industrial development and the continuously growing international commerce and trade may be resolved through mutual conciliation and settlement. These various alternative dispute-resolution techniques are discussed in detail in Part V of the book. For the sake of completeness, the book also includes a bibliography and a table of decided cases, which will prove especially useful to more inquisitive readers.