Arbitral Award May Bring 'Finality On Paper', But Mediation Can Bring 'True Accord': CJI Surya Kant

Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant on Friday said arbitration and mediation serve different purposes in dispute resolution, with arbitration providing a reasoned, binding award, while mediation can give parties greater ownership over the outcome and bring them to a “true accord”.

“Finality on paper and finality in fact are not always the same inheritance,” CJI Kant said, noting that a binding arbitral award may be followed by challenges to its execution and therefore “does not bring the parties to a true accord the way mediation does.”

Justice Kant was speaking at the three-day International Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Conference, 2026, being held from August 7 to 9 and organized by the Maadhyam International Council for Conflict Resolution.

The conference is being held in collaboration with the JAMS Foundation and the Weinstein International Foundation under the theme “ADR Pathways to Legal Harmony."

Keynote speakers included CJI Justice Surya Kant, Delhi High Court Chief Justice D.K. Upadhyaya, and Solicitor General Tushar Mehta.

Justice Kant said mediation's strength lies in allowing parties to participate in creating the terms of their settlement. He recalled an incident from before he joined the bench involving two friends who had become business partners and later arrived in court over a decade-old partnership dispute.

Before the matter was called, a senior member of the Bar suggested that the two men step into a smaller room and simply talk to each other.

“What followed was not a hearing at all, but a conversation between two long-time friends, halting at first and then increasingly candid.”

By evening, the two men who had arrived as adversaries “left as partners once again, having drafted, in their own hand and their own words, terms that no order of any court could have given them”, he recalled. 

Justice Kant said the episode illustrated the psychological basis of mediation. A party who has “had a genuine hand in drafting the terms of a resolution, rarely finds cause to abandon them later”.

By contrast, a party handed a verdict, “however sound in law, retains every incentive to test its edges, to appeal, to delay, to search for the crevice through which grievance can still escape.”

Citing research gathered across several decades and jurisdictions, the CJI said voluntary compliance with mediated settlements can run “as high as ninety per cent”, a figure that “stands well above compliance with outcomes arrived at through adjudication”.

Justice Kant, however, stressed that mediation was not inherently superior to arbitration.

“Arbitration, in my opinion, has earned its place in the architecture of modern commerce,” he said.

For disputes involving engineering, valuation or cross-border contracts, where finality must arrive within a “fixed and dependable timeline”, he said “there is no true substitute for a reasoned, binding award delivered by an arbitrator of the parties' own choosing.”

The distinction, Justice Kant explained, lies in the question each mechanism seeks to answer. Litigation and arbitration ask “who is right, and what the law demands of them”, while mediation asks “what the parties can themselves live with, and what they can build upon.”

He said the two processes need not operate as competing mechanisms. Referring to emerging hybrid processes such as med-arb-med, Justice Kant said the approach combines “arbitration's rigor with mediation's sense of ownership”.

The CJI also highlighted how mediation has evolved through trained professionals, institutional mediation centres, case managers, encrypted digital files and Online Dispute Resolution platforms.

Turning to India, Justice Kant said the Mediation Act, 2023 gave the country its first standalone statutory architecture for mediation. Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015 had already signalled that mediation was meant to be “the first recourse rather than the last resort”, he said.

“There is no reason why India cannot establish herself as a genuine centre of mediation for the global community,” he said, calling for a “state-of-the-art framework” capable of keeping pace with India's economic growth.

Justice Kant concluded by expressing hope that India would take its place among the “true frontrunners” of the ADR field worldwide