The Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (the Act) was enacted to consolidate the law relating to domestic and international commercial arbitration and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in India. The Act is a self-contained code. However, various judicial pronouncements on the applicability of the Act to certain disputes muddle the waters to an extent.
While Section 2(3) of the Act recognises that “certain disputes may not be submitted to arbitration”, it does not identify which ‘disputes’ are not arbitrable in India. Absent any such clear demarcation within the Act on the arbitrability of ‘disputes’, the judiciary in India has risen to the occasion and has attempted to fill this void. But the growing dependency on courts to define the contours of arbitrability of disputes in India has often led to uncertainty in the face of varied interpretations. One such category of disputes of which arbitrability in India remains moot are the Intellectual Property Rights disputes (IP disputes).
Please click here to read the full article by Pratik Pawar, Shanaya Cyrus Irani, and Ananya Verma published in Express Computer.
Pratik’s core area of practice is litigation and alternative dispute resolution in a diverse range of corporate & commercial disputes, matters pertaining to public trusts, and matters arising out of engineering and construction contracts, and matters pertaining to media & entertainment law.
Shanaya is part of the Disputes practice of the firm. She focuses on dispute resolution and handles Indian & international arbitration. She has acted for several international as well as Indian clients in many arbitrations, as well as diverse litigation proceedings.