Discuss how India's recent Free Trade Agreements and Bilateral Investment Treaties can be leveraged to strengthen the domestic commercial arbitration ecosystem.

India's Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 already covers domestic arbitration, international commercial arbitration and enforcement of foreign awards [1]. The recent FTA–BIT wave supplies the ingredient the statute has lacked — deal flow — but converting it into arbitration capacity requires deliberate treaty design, not automatic spillover.

Treaties create arbitrable deal flow

• The India–UAE BIT, signed February 2024, entered into force on 31 August 2024, restoring investment protection as the 2013 BIPPA lapsed [3]; BITs with Uzbekistan and Israel followed.
• India–EFTA TEPA carries a binding pledge of $100 billion FDI and one million jobs over 15 years [4]. Each project spawns supply, EPC and joint-venture contracts — every one of them carrying an arbitration clause.

Where the real leverage lies

• Separate ISDS (investor versus State, heard abroad) from commercial arbitration (firm versus firm). Only the latter feeds Indian institutions, so FTA-generated commercial contracts — not BIT dispute chapters — are the lever.
• Promote model contract language naming an Indian seat, so work does not drift by default to Singapore, London or Dubai.
• Complete India's agreement with the Permanent Court of Arbitration; the Standing Committee on External Affairs sought its early implementation precisely to make India an arbitration hub [5].

Institutional capacity must keep pace

• The Arbitration Council of India, created by the 2019 amendment, grades arbitral institutions and accredits arbitrators [2] — grading is what lets foreign counsel choose an Indian institution confidently.
• Build government panels of domestic arbitration counsel; the Committee found India depends on expensive foreign lawyers [5].

Limits to the leverage

• India terminated BITs with 77 countries after 2015, leaving only six older treaties in force, against 37 dispute notices raised [5]; credibility is still being rebuilt.
• Mandatory local-remedies periods push disputes into slow courts first; the Committee's answer — pre-arbitration consultation and precisely drafted treaty text — is the better defence than blunt barriers [5].

Treaties do not build hubs; they create caseload that a credible ecosystem can capture. Pairing precise drafting and Indian-seat clauses with a functioning Arbitration Council and trained domestic counsel would convert market access into legal-services capability, improving ease of doing business and the predictability investors ultimately price in.