Holding The Fort Until Tribunal Formation: Emergency Arbitration’s Evolution And The Case For Statutory Recognition In India

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Yuvraj Singh Salh & Advaith Madhu, National Law Institute University (NLIU), Bhopal.

ABSTRACT

Emergency arbitration has moved from being a procedural experiment to an assumed feature of serious institutional arbitration, yet its position within Indian arbitration law remains unsettled. This article examines that dissonance. It situates emergency arbitration as a response to the structural limits of court-centric interim relief and tribunal-dependent authority, tracing how leading arbitral institutions have redesigned urgency as an internal arbitral function rather than a judicial fallback. Against this comparative backdrop, the article turns to the Indian framework, where Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act has been stretched to absorb demands it was never designed to meet. Through an analysis of recent judicial developments, particularly Amazon v. Future Retail, and policy material including the 2024 Expert Committee Report and earlier High Level Committee recommendations, the article argues that judicial accommodation has reached its limits. It concludes by advancing targeted policy suggestions for statutory recognition of emergency arbitration in India, proposing calibrated amendments to the Act that preserve judicial oversight while restoring coherence, predictability, and credibility to interim relief within arbitration.

42. HOLDING THE FORT UNTIL TRIBUNAL FORMATION- EMERGENCY ARBITRATION’S EVOLUTION AND THE C

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