Centre plans to revive IIAC, adds incentives for maritime arbitration and MSMEs

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: The government is planning to revive the India International Arbitration Centre (IIAC), a statutory body created in 2019, by incentivizing various parties to arbitrate at the New Delhi institution in an effort to increase its case load, two government officials said on the condition of anonymity.

Following amendments in rules for arbitrations involving micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in June this year, the IIAC, which is the only arbitration institution directly funded by the Union government, is in the early stages of convening a new chapter of its services, specializing in international maritime arbitration. "The new centre for arbitration in Mumbai will not be a new body, but more like a branch of the IIAC," said Hemant Gupta, chairperson of the IIAC, and a retired supreme court judge.

Both steps taken to incentivize MSMEs as well as parties to maritime arbitrations are to promote institutional arbitration in the country, Gupta said. Efforts to promote arbitration for out-of-court dispute resolution started before the turn of the millennium, with the institution of the International Centre for Alternative Dispute Resolution (ICADR) and passage of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act in 1995 and 1996 respectively.

Promoting institutional arbitration was a key function of the ICADR. However, a weak case load was a crucial issue with the ICADR, indicating that India was far from adopting institutional arbitration as a go-to dispute resolution method, according to an expert committee report by a panel led by retired supreme court judge B.N.

Srikrishna in 2017. "…The case load of the ICADR has been 49 arbitration cases since its inception as compared to 343 new