SOURCE :- SIASAT NEWS
Hyderabad: Men were handed seven of every 10 arbitrator appointments made by the Supreme Court and the High Courts of Delhi and Bombay last year, a study by the NALSAR University of Law has found.
Of the 2,283 appointments made in 2025 where the arbitrator’s gender was recorded, 1,598 went to men and 685 to women. The figures come from the report “Arbitrator Appointments in Numbers,” brought out by the university’s Milon K Banerji Centre for Arbitration Law.
The skew was sharpest in the apex court, where men accounted for 79.17 per cent of appointments. The figure stood at 71.30 per cent in the Bombay High Court and 68.88 per cent in the Delhi High Court.
All the appointments were made under Section 11 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996. The provision allows courts to name an arbitrator in certain situations, such as when parties to a dispute fail to agree on one.
An arbitrator is a neutral third party who settles disputes outside the regular court system, in a role much like that of a judge.
Appointment the usual outcome
The study covered 3,688 unique cases across the three courts, 65 of them from the Supreme Court, and tracked how Section 11 petitions were disposed of.
A petition can end in one of four ways, the report said. The court can appoint an arbitrator, the petitioner can withdraw, the court can dismiss the plea or the parties can settle.
Appointment was the most common result in all three courts. It made up 82.61 per cent of disposals in the Bombay High Court, 78.02 per cent in the Delhi High Court and 70.59 per cent in the Supreme Court.
According to the report, the difference between the courts came down almost entirely to dismissals. The Supreme Court dismissed 17.65 per cent of the petitions it disposed of, against 4.02 per cent in Bombay and 5.09 per cent in Delhi.
The centre is chaired by former Supreme Court judge Rohinton Fali Nariman. Senior advocate Ritin Rai is its co-chair and advocate Amit George is director (research).
A thin pool at the top
The study does not look at whether the figures match the gender make-up of the pool from which arbitrators are drawn.
Bar Council of India data offers some context. About 1.16 lakh candidates cleared the All India Bar Examination (AIBE XXI) in 2026, and 42,757 of them, or around 37 per cent, were women.
Women’s presence thins out further up the judiciary. They make up about 37 per cent of district court judges, nearly 15 per cent of High Court judges and roughly 5 per cent of Supreme Court judges, the data showed.
Chand Chopra, advocate and associate director (research) at the centre, said the appointment numbers reflected how few women there are in the profession and on the bench, especially in the higher judiciary. Parties often want a retired Supreme Court or High Court judge as their arbitrator, but “the pool of women judges is limited,” Chopra told Times of India.
SOURCE : SIASAT
