Why Arbitration Data Is Not Public in India (and What to Do About It)

Explainer · Arbitration in India

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

If you have ever tried to look up an arbitral award in India the way you would look up a court judgment, you already know the problem: there is no public database to search. That is not an accident or a gap someone forgot to fix. Arbitration in India is built around confidentiality, by statute and by the rules of most arbitral institutions, so the awards, the evidence, and even the fact that a dispute exists usually stay out of public view. This explainer sets out why that is the case, what part of an arbitration does become public, and what lawyers, in house counsel, and businesses can do to research and track arbitration matters despite the gap.

01Why arbitration data stays out of public view in India

Court litigation in India runs on public record. Cause lists, hearings, and judgments are, with narrow exceptions, open to anyone. Arbitration works the opposite way. It is designed as a private process, and Indian law now says so in plain words.

The law treats confidentiality as the default

Section 42A of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (inserted by the 2019 amendment) requires the arbitrator, the arbitral institution, and the parties to keep all arbitral proceedings confidential. The only carve out is the award itself, and only to the extent its disclosure is necessary to implement or enforce it. Everything else, the pleadings, the evidence, the hearing, and the reasoning, stays private by default. There is no general public interest exception written into the section, unlike what an earlier expert committee had recommended.

The one register that was meant to open things up never got built

The same 2019 amendment also created the Arbitration Council of India (ACI) and, under Section 43K, gave it the job of maintaining an electronic depository of arbitral awards made in India. On paper, that could have become the closest thing India has to a public arbitration archive. In practice, the Council has not been operationally constituted years after the provision was meant to take effect, so the depository does not function as a public resource today.

Most Indian arbitration has no institutional home to publish anything

A large share of arbitration in India is ad hoc, meaning the parties and a privately appointed arbitrator run the process themselves, without an institution administering it. Ad hoc arbitration has no annual report, no case management system, and no one whose job it is to publish even anonymised statistics. Institutional arbitration, run through bodies such as the Indian Council of Arbitration (ICA), the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration (MCIA), or the Delhi International Arbitration Centre (DIAC), at least has a body that could choose to publish aggregated numbers. Most ad hoc matters simply leave no public trace at all.

02Why the lack of public arbitration data is a real problem

Confidentiality is a genuine selling point of arbitration for the parties involved in a single dispute. But at a system level, the absence of public data creates real costs.

• No visibility into arbitrator track records. Unlike judges, whose reasoning is on the public record for anyone to study, most arbitrators build a reputation on word of mouth. There is no public way to check how an arbitrator has ruled before, how long their matters typically take, or how their awards have fared on challenge.
• No body of precedent to learn from. Case law develops because judgments are published and lawyers can study patterns. Arbitral awards mostly cannot serve that function in India, because they are not published, so each dispute is argued in relative isolation from how similar disputes were actually decided.
• Hard to benchmark cost and time. Businesses choosing between arbitration and litigation, or between institutional and ad hoc arbitration, have very little public data on how long matters actually take or what they cost end to end.
• It works against India’s own ambition to be an arbitration hub. India has invested in becoming a preferred seat for domestic and international arbitration. Global users of arbitration increasingly expect a degree of transparency, published rules, and institutional statistics, from the venues they choose. A system where almost nothing is public is a harder sell to that audience.
• Opacity feeds distrust rather than confidence. When outcomes cannot be checked or compared, parties are left to take the process on faith. That is a weaker position for arbitration to argue from than if a reasonable amount of aggregate, anonymised data were available.

In litigation, secrecy is the exception a court has to order. In Indian arbitration, secrecy is the default the law already gives you.

03What actually is public in an Indian arbitration

The private core of arbitration, the hearing, the evidence, and the award, stays confidential. But arbitration in India is not entirely invisible. It touches the court system at several points, and those touchpoints usually are public, because they run through ordinary litigation, not through the arbitration itself.

The pattern is consistent: the moment a dispute leaves the arbitral tribunal and enters a court, whether that is to challenge an award, appeal a challenge, seek interim relief, or enforce the outcome, it usually becomes a normal court proceeding, and normal court proceedings in India are public unless a judge specifically orders otherwise. That is the main window into how Indian courts are actually treating arbitration, even though the arbitration itself stays closed.

04What lawyers and businesses can do about it

You cannot make Indian arbitration public on your own, but you can work around the gap in a few practical ways.

• Negotiate disclosure terms into the arbitration clause up front. If precedent value or internal benchmarking matters to you, the clause is the place to fix it, for example by allowing anonymised publication of the award with the parties’ consent, since the default position under the law will not give you that.
• Prefer institutional arbitration when transparency matters to you. Institutions such as the ICA, MCIA, and DIAC at least have panels of accredited arbitrators and, in some cases, publish aggregated statistics, which gives you more to work with than a purely ad hoc process.
• Track the court layer, not the arbitration layer. Section 34 petitions, Section 37 appeals, and Section 9 applications are where Indian courts explain, in public, how they are reading the Arbitration and Conciliation Act. Following these judgments is the closest thing available today to studying how arbitration disputes actually play out.
• Do independent due diligence on arbitrators. Since there is no public track record, ask directly for an arbitrator’s past matters and outcomes where confidentiality allows, and lean on bar associations and institutional panels for background.
• Keep your own internal record. Law firms and in house teams that handle repeat arbitrations benefit from keeping a private playbook of past awards, arbitrators, and outcomes, since there is no external repository to lean on instead.
• Watch for the depository, but do not plan around it yet. The Section 43K depository, if it becomes operational, could change this picture. Until then, treat today’s opacity as the working reality, not a temporary gap that is about to close.

05Where Claw fits

Claw is an all-in-one legaltech platform for Indian advocates, law firms, and corporate legal teams, combining AI-based case search, an AI legal assistant (Legal GPT), case management, and compliance automation across all Indian courts and tribunals.

Claw does not, and by law cannot, give anyone access to a private arbitral award. That confidentiality is exactly what Section 42A is there to protect, and no legaltech platform, Claw included, changes that. What Claw does help with is the public layer sitting around arbitration: the Section 34 petitions to set aside awards, the Section 37 appeals, the Section 9 interim relief applications, and the Section 36 enforcement proceedings that move through India’s courts once a dispute leaves the arbitral tribunal. Claw’s case search covers 25 High Courts (1980 to 2026) and the Supreme Court (1950 to 2026), with verified, court-ready citations, so a lawyer or in house team that wants to see how Indian courts are actually interpreting the Arbitration and Conciliation Act can research that public record quickly instead of piecing it together manually. For teams tracking an arbitration-linked matter as it moves through court after an award, Claw’s case management also covers 8200+ courts, tribunals, and forums, with automatic updates, cause lists, and alerts, so nothing on the public docket gets missed while the underlying award itself stays exactly as private as the law requires.

06Sources and further reading

Primary references used for this explainer:

• Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (as amended), full text: indiacode.nic.in
• Press Information Bureau, on the Arbitration Council of India rules: pib.gov.in
• Indian Council of Arbitration (an example of an Indian arbitral institution): icaindia.co.in
• Claw: clawlaw.in

The operational status of the Arbitration Council of India and its award depository can change. Confirm current status before relying on it.

07Frequently asked questions