Ahmedabad, November 4: The Gujarat High Court has urged parties, lawyers and arbitral institutions to widen the pool of arbitrators to include more qualified women and technical experts, flagging their underrepresentation in court-appointed arbitrations, Live Law and Bar and Bench reported on Wednesday.

Source: Live Law

A single bench of Justice D.N. Ray cited an October 2026 study, Arbitrator Appointments in Numbers, published by the Milon K. Banerji Centre for Arbitration Law at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. The study examined court-made appointments in cases registered in 2025 before the Supreme Court and the Delhi and Bombay High Courts, with data collected until June 30, 2026.

Source: Bar and Bench

"Without derogating from the primacy of competence, integrity and independence, this Court is of the considered view that such under-representation merits due attention. Parties, counsel and arbitral institutions are, therefore, encouraged to widen the pool from which arbitrators are drawn, so as to include duly qualified women and technical experts," the court said.

The court referred to Section 11(8) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, and to the Supreme Court's decision in Voestalpine Schienen GmbH v. Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Ltd., which called for broad-based arbitrator panels including engineers and other professionals, not merely judges and lawyers. It noted that professionals with technical expertise can help resolve disputes involving specialised issues.

The observations came in arbitration petitions arising from a partnership dispute in the firm Corus Metal. According to the petitioners — Shilpaben Shah and the other legal heirs of Sanjay Pravinchandra Shah — the firm was constituted in June 2020 with both partners holding equal shares, and they alleged that the surviving partner, Jasmin Pravinchandra Shah, sold land belonging to the firm for Rs 1.81 crore without paying the deceased partner his 50 per cent share of the consideration. Sanjay Shah died in December 2025, and his heirs sought settlement of the firm's accounts, including capital amounting to Rs 74.73 lakh. These are allegations made in the petitions; the respondent opposed the appointment of an arbitrator and raised an objection of accord and satisfaction, which the court rejected as unsustainable, relying on the Supreme Court's ruling in SBI General Insurance Co. Ltd. v. Krish Spinning.

Allowing the petitions, the court appointed former Gujarat High Court judge Justice Mauna M. Bhatt as sole arbitrator to resolve the disputes under the Arbitration Centre (Domestic and International), High Court of Gujarat Rules, 2021, and disposed of the pending connected applications without an order as to costs. Advocate Aditya A. Gupta appeared for the petitioners and Advocate Padmraj K. Jadeja for the respondent.