Nijjar backs better arbitration

Inspite of having proper infrastructure in place, Indian Institutional Arbitration (IA) was unable to attract foreign arbitration matters because of co-ordination problems regarding rules, S S Nijjar, chief justice of Calcutta High Court, said here at the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) session on 'Exploring the path of institutional arbitration'.

Nijjar said, "Have we succeeded in resolution of conflicts? Answer in my experience is no. We cannot limit these institutions to metropolitan cities but need to spread out to districts. In United States, almost every district deals with commercial problems whereas we do not have institutions dealing with disputes. There needs to be much more coordination in rules to make arbitration procedures in India attractive to foreign arbitrators."

G K Kwatra, executive director of Indian Council Of Arbitration (ICA), claimed in response that the council had been trying to spread out to districts and had visited districts in Uttaranchal and Kerala.

ICA had been attracting foreign arbitration and handled around 25 foreign arbitration cases in 2008 and total of 150 cases till date, he claimed.

Average time required for cases was around 5-6 months, he added. N G Khaitan, advocate and member of the governing body of ICA, said, "around 1,200 institutions are providing arbitrations worldwide and ICA is one of them but the World Bank has listed India to be the slowest in case of arbitration or resolution of disputes." Kwatra said adhoc arbitrators were a 'menace' but around 95 per cent of arbitrators were of the adhoc type.