Five years ago, NITI Aayog published a detailed vision for how India could build a digital dispute resolution ecosystem from scratch. In 2026, it is time to check in honestly on what happened.
The Report That Started the Conversation
In 2021, NITI Aayog published a document called ‘Designing the Future of Dispute Resolution: The ODR Policy Plan for India.’ For lawyers and policy people who read it, the reaction was mixed. Some found it genuinely exciting. A serious policy paper from a credible institution, arguing that India should build a digital-first dispute resolution infrastructure. Others were more cautious, having seen many such vision documents circulate without producing much visible change.
The argument the report made was fairly clear. India had tens of millions of cases pending across its courts. Conventional infrastructure, more courtrooms, more judges, more staff, would never be sufficient to clear the backlog or serve the volume of disputes that a growing economy generates. ODR offered a different approach. Invest in digital infrastructure, trained neutrals, and enabling legal frameworks, and you could resolve disputes faster, cheaper, and more accessibly than the traditional system ever could.
Now, in mid-2026, it is a fair moment to ask: how much of that has actually come to pass?
An Honest Accounting
The progress is real, and it would be unfair to dismiss it. India has moved from a situation in 2021 where ODR was mostly a concept discussed at legal conferences to a situation today where multiple accredited platforms are functioning, mediators are being trained at scale, regulatory nudges have pushed ODR into specific sectors, and the government is actively incorporating ODR provisions into procurement contracts. That is meaningful progress.
But the original vision was ambitious enough that partial progress leaves notable gaps. ODR is still not the default mechanism for everyday commercial disputes across the country. Adoption is concentrated in urban areas and in sectors where regulators have specifically mandated or encouraged it. The legal enforceability framework, while strengthened by the Mediation Act of 2023, still creates enough uncertainty that many practitioners advise higher-stakes clients to stick with institutional arbitration or court proceedings.
The picture, in short, is one of a system that exists and works, but has not yet reached the scale or the depth that the original vision described.
ODR in Government Contracts: A Real Shift
One development that has been genuinely significant is the integration of ODR into government procurement. India’s Government e-Marketplace, commonly called GeM, manages procurement contracts between government buyers and private vendors across a huge range of goods and services. Before ODR was integrated into this platform, disputes between a government department and a supplier often got stuck in slow internal grievance processes, the kind that smaller vendors simply did not have the patience or resources to follow through.
The ODR module within GeM has changed this in a practical way. A vendor who has a dispute over a payment, a quality rejection, or a delivery timeline can now initiate an online dispute process, upload their documents, and participate in a mediated session conducted by a trained neutral, all from their office. They do not need to hire a lawyer to navigate government bureaucracy. They do not need to travel to Delhi or file a court case.
Resolution timelines have shortened considerably for routine disputes. For smaller vendors who supply to government agencies, particularly MSMEs that run on thin margins and tight cash flows, this has been a real operational improvement. The Ministry of Law and Justice has also started incorporating ODR clauses into standard government contract templates, a quiet but meaningful signal that ODR is being treated as a standard feature rather than an experimental add-on.
MSMEs: The Constituency That Needed This Most
Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises have always had a difficult relationship with the formal legal system. They generate a very large share of India’s economic output and employ a huge proportion of its workforce. They also face a disproportionate burden when disputes arise. A small manufacturer in Coimbatore with a payment dispute against a large buyer does not have the legal budget, the time, or the stamina for civil litigation. The practical outcome, historically, was that MSMEs absorbed losses rather than pursued claims.
ODR was designed, in part, to fix this. Accredited platforms that serve MSME disputes now offer simplified filing processes, options to conduct proceedings in regional languages, much lower fees than institutional arbitration, and mediators who have actual small business experience. The MSME Samadhaan portal, which already existed for payment disputes, has been complemented by a broader ODR ecosystem that covers a wider range of commercial conflicts.
The practical results are visible. Disputes that used to take years to resolve, or never get resolved at all, are now being closed out in weeks. A 45-day resolution timeline for a supply chain payment dispute is not unusual. For an MSME managing its working capital quarter to quarter, recovering a disputed amount in six weeks rather than three years is not a minor administrative improvement. It is the difference between stability and a cash crisis.
What Has Not Been Solved Yet
The enforceability of ODR settlements from non-institutional platforms remains patchy. The Mediation Act of 2023 created a statutory basis for enforcing mediated settlements, which was a significant legislative step. But courts in different parts of the country have not applied this uniformly. There are still situations where a party that wins a mediated settlement through an ODR platform has to go back to court to enforce it, which defeats some of the purpose.
Platform standardisation is another unresolved issue. Multiple ODR providers operate in India today, all under different technical standards and with different data formats. If a dispute starts on one platform and needs to be escalated to a different institution, transferring records can be genuinely difficult. A national interoperability standard, something like what UPI did for payments, would address this, but it has not been built yet.
Digital infrastructure access in rural areas also continues to constrain the reach of ODR. Reliable broadband, devices capable of supporting video conferencing, and the digital literacy needed to navigate an ODR platform are still unevenly distributed across the country.
Five Years In: An Honest Assessment
NITI Aayog’s 2021 report was a bet that India could build something genuinely new in dispute resolution. Five years later, that bet has not fully paid off, but it has not failed either. The ecosystem exists. The legal framework has been strengthened. Government procurement has been integrated. MSMEs are using ODR. Mediators are being trained.
What the ODR Handbook 2.0 needs, if someone were writing it today, is not a new vision. The vision was fine. What it needs is a brutally honest implementation roadmap: which platforms need to be standardised, which enforcement gaps need legislative fixes, which rural connectivity investments need to happen, and which institutions need to take ownership of scaling the mediator pipeline.
India’s ODR story is genuinely underway. It is incomplete and imperfect. But it is real, and that matters.
