By: Pranjal Kushwaha and Divyansh Morolia
INTRODUCTION
It is a truth universally acknowledged in sports jurisprudence that an athlete’s peak career is measured not in decades, but in seasons. A selection dispute left unresolved for eight months does not merely inconvenience the athlete; it may rather extinguish their competitive life. It is against this unforgiving backdrop of biological time that one must assess, the National Sports Tribunal (hereinafter ‘NST’) established under the National Sports Governance Act, 2025 (No. 25 of 2025) (hereinafter ‘Act’), a body recently made operational through the notification of the National Sports Governance (National Sports Tribunal) Rules, 2026 (hereinafter ‘Rules’) in May 2026.
The Act’s long title provides that it seeks “resolution of sports grievances and sports disputes in a unified, equitable and effective manner.” NST has been spoken of in official communications as a “single-window mechanism for quicker, simpler and more accessible resolution.” It’s difficult to quarrel with the objective but one must quarrel, with considerable force, with the mechanism chosen to achieve it. Especially since history warns against optimism, as India has twice attempted to establish a functional sports dispute resolution framework, and twice it has failed. First, when the Indian Court of Arbitration for Sports (hereinafter ‘ICAS’), constituted in 2011 by the Indian Olympic Association under the chairmanship of Justice A.R. Lakshmanan (Retd.), registered not a single case throughout its existence. Second, when the Sports Arbitration Centre of India (hereinafter ‘SACI’), inaugurated with great fanfare in September 2021 by the then-Minister of Law and Justice in Ahmedabad, fared no better.
This article argues that in establishing the NST as a fixed three-member quasi-judicial tribunal with exclusive and sweeping jurisdiction, ousting civil courts and mandating the immediate transfer of all pending litigation, the Parliament has constructed, with the best of intentions, an administrative bottleneck of considerable proportions. Furthermore, by abandoning any institutional framework for arbitration or mediation, the Act compounds the error by foreclosing the very mechanisms that have proven most efficacious globally. The consequence, if unaddressed, will be a generation of Indian athletes consigned to the waiting rooms of a tribunal that cannot keep pace with the brevity of their careers.
THE STRUCTURAL BOTTLENECK: A SINGLE BODY FOR A NATION OF DISPUTES
Section 17 of the Act constitutes the NST as a body comprising a Chairperson, who must be a sitting or former Judge of the Supreme Court of India or the Chief Justice of a High Court, and two Members possessing eminence in sports, public administration, or law. This three-member tribunal is intended to adjudicate the totality of domestic sports disputes arising across India that fields athletes in over fifty-three recognised sports disciplines, organised through a national structure of federations, regional bodies, district affiliates, and Olympic and Paralympic committees.
Disputes arising in this ecosystem span a heterogeneous landscape: election challenges to federation office-bearers; selection grievances from individual athletes; disciplinary proceedings against coaches; contractual disagreements between associations and sponsors; and allegations touching upon ethics, safe sport, and human rights. Section 17(1) extends the NST’s mandate to all of this, vaguely described as “sports-related disputes,” a term the Act conspicuously declines to define.
The gravity of this structural error is illuminated by comparison with India’s existing tribunal jurisprudence. India’s commercial tribunals, as documented in the , collectively carry a backlog exceeding 3.56 lakh cases, with a combined commercial value of approximately Rs 24.72 lakh crore, roughly 7.48 percent of GDP for 2024-25. The National Company Law Tribunal, a multi-bench body with over 15 benches across the country, still had 14,961 pending cases as of March 2025, with average insolvency resolution timelines up to 688 days, nearly double the statutory maximum of 330 days. By the close of 2025, nearly 24 of its 30 court halls were operating on half-day schedules. These are cautionary figures of the highest order.
The NST, by contrast, is constituted as a single-bench entity, one Chairperson and two Members, with no provision for the creation of additional divisions, circuits, or benches. The Act does not prescribe a mandatory timeline for case disposal, and section 17 merely empowers the Tribunal to “formulate its own procedure,” including “with respect to setting timelines.”
This absence of a statutory time limit of the kind prescribed, for instance, under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, or the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, is not a technical lacuna. It is a structural invitation to delay. A tribunal that sets its own timelines, without parliamentary compulsion, will, experience informs us, expand those timelines to accommodate its own capacity constraints. For a professional athlete, livelihood is indistinguishable from competitive access. A single-bench tribunal adjudicating disputes from an entire nation, without statutory time limits, is structurally inconsistent with this constitutional commitment.
THE OUSTER OF JURISDICTION AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE CHOKEHOLD OF SECTION 22
The second systemic flaw is more immediately consequential. Section 23 of the Act bars civil courts from entertaining any matter that falls within the NST’s jurisdiction. Section 22(1) compounds this by mandating that all cases under civil jurisdiction in which National Sports Bodies are impleaded as parties, and the ones which are pending before any District Court or High Court at the time of the NST’s constitution, shall be transferred to it “on and from such date as may be specified by the Central Government.”
The phrase “all pending cases” deserves particular attention. The legislative intent, as a plain reading of Sections 22 and 23 reveals, is both comprehensive and retrospective in its sweep. Every suit in which a national sports body has been impleaded, regardless of the nature of the dispute, whether contractual, tortious, or governance-related, is to be transplanted from courts that may have been seized of those matters for years, to a newly constituted three-member body that has not yet adjudicated a single case. The transferred cases are to continue “from the stage at which such dispute was pending,” or, in the Tribunal’s discretion, “heard afresh.” This appears to be less of rationalisation of the adjudicative landscape; and more of the creation of an immediate and acute administrative chokehold.
At this juncture, one must draw an analogy to Section 434 of the Companies Act, 2013, which similarly mandated the transfer of all Company Law Board proceedings to the newly constituted NCLT. That transfer, despite NCLT having multiple benches, generated years of procedural confusion and contributed directly to the pendency crisis that has since become a matter of public and parliamentary concern. The NST transfer mechanism replicates this design, but with a single bench and no statutory deadlines. Given this backdrop, the risk of analogous dysfunction is not speculative but structurally predetermined.
Perhaps the most consequential error in the Act’s architecture lies not in what it creates, but in what it omits: a robust, institutional framework for Alternative Dispute Resolution (hereinafter, “ADR”). While the preamble promises a “unified, equitable and effective” dispute resolution system, the international gold standard for such a mechanism, namely, arbitration, mediation, and hybrid systems embedded within a specialist institution, is conspicuously absent from the statute.
This omission cannot be dismissed as a novel oversight. Rather, it ignores historical precedent, as India has already failed twice to establish a functional sports arbitration mechanism. A mature legislative response would have diagnosed the root causes of these failures, such as flawed institutional design, the absence of mandatory arbitration clauses in federation constitutions, and weak enforcement mechanisms, rather than repeating them through total omission.
(Pranjal Kushwaha is an associate at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas. Divyansh Morolia is an associate at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co. The authors may be contacted via mail at Pranjalk5585@gmail.com and divyanshmorolia2003@gmail.com, respectively.)