New Delhi: The Centre’s notification establishing the Mediation Council of India gives the country’s long-awaited mediation regulator a formal institutional home—but much of the work needed to make mediation a mainstream alternative to litigation remains.
The Mediation Council of India (MCI), notified by the Union law and justice ministry on 27 August, is a statutory body envisaged under the Mediation Act, 2023. It is intended to regulate mediation service providers and mediators, set standards, accredit mediation institutes and promote mediation in India.
What is the MCI?
The MCI is a statutory body established under the Mediation Act, 2023, comprising a chairperson and other members appointed in accordance with the Act.
Its mandate includes regulating mediation service providers and mediators, laying down standards, accrediting mediation institutes, and promoting and developing mediation in India.
Mediation is a form of dispute resolution outside the courts, where a neutral third party facilitates communication between disputing parties to help them reach a mutually acceptable settlement.
The regulatory body is intended to provide greater institutional oversight and encourage mediation as an alternative to court-based dispute resolution.
Mediation differs from arbitration. Arbitration is an adjudicatory process in which a neutral arbitrator hears the parties and makes a binding decision, or award. In mediation, the mediator facilitates negotiations, while the parties retain control over whether and on what terms to settle.
The 27 August notification, however, is narrow. It contains a single provision formally establishing the MCI in New Delhi.
The law ministry had earlier notified provisions of the Mediation Act in 2023 concerning the qualifications of members and part-time members of the council.
What happens next?
Formal establishment is only one step towards making the new mediation framework operational.
Mediation service providers say the notification puts an important piece of the institutional architecture in place, but several steps remain.
“The notification gives effect to an important part of the vision of the Mediation Act, 2023 and sets the institutional framework in place. There are, however, several important steps still to come, including the appointment of the members of the Council and the operationalisation of various provisions under the Act. The notification is therefore a welcome step in the right direction, and there is still a considerable journey ahead to make mediation a truly mainstream and accessible form of dispute resolution in India,” said Krunal Modi, founding member and chief of staff at Presolv360, a Mumbai-based ADR service provider.
India already has alternate dispute resolution (ADR) service providers, including institutions handling arbitration and mediation. The government’s broader objective is to encourage institutional rather than ad-hoc dispute resolution, with specialized providers overseeing the process.
Why does this matter for courts?
India’s judicial backlog is one reason the government has sought to expand alternatives to litigation.
According to the NJDG, district courts had 32.6 million pending civil and criminal cases, with the lack of counsels cited as the primary reason for delays. High courts had another 2.7 million pending cases, while the Supreme Court had 26,953 pending matters.
The NJDG does not cite reasons for delays in high courts and the Supreme Court.
There is no government dataset on ADR cases in India. But past reports by high-level committees have described the country’s arbitration and mediation ecosystem as largely ad-hoc, with parties deciding procedural rules and appointing arbitrators and mediators.
That model can leave parties dissatisfied and result in disputes returning to the courts through appeals, according to industry experts.
The government’s push is therefore not simply to increase mediation and arbitration, but to strengthen specialized institutions that can administer these processes.
The Centre took a similar approach with arbitration. In 2024, it proposed amendments to the Arbitration & Conciliation Act, 1996—the principal law governing arbitration in India—to create an appellate body for arbitration cases, with access limited to disputes resolved through an institution. Mint reported on the development in 2024.
Does better dispute resolution help the economy?
The link between dispute resolution and the business environment has featured in global measures of economic competitiveness.
The World Bank’s now-discontinued Doing Business report assessed the ease of doing business across countries. One parameter was enforcement of contracts, covering a country’s ability to ensure contractual obligations were fulfilled and the efficiency of its judicial system when they were not.
India’s overall ranking improved to 63rd in the 2020 report—the last one published—from 77th the previous year. But its ranking on enforcing contracts remained unchanged at 163rd in both 2019 and 2020.
The MCI is intended to address a more specific part of the problem: creating a formal institutional framework around mediation to encourage parties to resolve disputes outside the courts.