By: Pranjal Kushwaha and Divyansh Morolia
Part I of this article argued that the National Sports Tribunal, as constituted under the National Sports Governance Act, 2025, suffers from a few structural infirmities. The foregoing critique, however, is incomplete without its necessary complement, i.e. an affirmative account of what a functioning sports dispute resolution system looks like, drawn not from aspiration, but from empirical record.
LESSONS FROM JURISDICTIONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE CASE FOR AN ARBITRAL MODEL
The legislature’s instinct to create a specialist forum was correct. Its error lay in the design chosen to house that instinct. A survey of the world’s most consequential sports dispute resolution institutions, all of which predate the NST and function at demonstrably higher levels of speed, legitimacy, and athlete-centricity, reveals a common and replicable architecture. That architecture rests on four pillars: institutional arbitration, a curated roster of specialist adjudicators, procedural flexibility calibrated to the nature of the dispute, and a pluralism of ADR mechanisms. The NST, as currently constituted, incorporates none of the four.
A. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Lausanne
The Court of Arbitration for Sport, established in 1984 under the authority of the International Council of Arbitration for Sport (ICAS) in Lausanne, is the undisputed institutional benchmark. Having processed over 12,000 cases since its inception and currently receiving approximately 900 procedures per year, the CAS has reinforced that institutional legitimacy and operational velocity are not competing values; they are, in a well-designed institution, mutually reinforcing.
Rather than a fixed bench of three members, enabling the concurrent constitution of dozens of independent three-member panels without generating queues. The ICAS empanel arbitrators with deep expertise in sports governance, doping science, contract law, and constitutional law, a depth of specialisation that a three-member standing tribunal can practically never replicate.
The CAS model’s most instructive feature, however, is its Ad Hoc Division, governed by procedural rules (specifically Article 18) that mandate a binding decision within 24 hours of the application being lodged. This is not an aspiration recorded in a preamble. It is an enforceable procedural obligation that has been consistently met across six decades of major event deployments. The model recognises, with structural seriousness, that sporting time is categorically distinct from civil litigation time, and engineers its procedures accordingly. For standard appeals proceedings, the CAS further requires respondents to file answers within 20 days and mandates that awards be notified within four months of the conclusion of evidentiary proceedings.
B. Australia’s National Sports Tribunal (ANST)
Unlike India’s NST, which is constituted as a quasi-judicial body with fixed membership and mandatory exclusive jurisdiction, the ANST is explicitly arbitral in character and opt-in in its jurisdiction. Its authority arises from contractual arrangements between sports bodies and the Tribunal, being a model that balances constitutional access to judicial forums with party autonomy in selecting specialist adjudication, without imposing a compulsory ouster of court jurisdiction that could contribute to additional delays as under Sections 22 and 23 of the Indian Act.
Structurally, the ANST is bifurcated into three logically distinct branches, the General Division, the Appeals Division, and the Anti-Doping Division allowing for highly specialised adjudication calibrated to the nature of the dispute. The empirical record of the Tribunal’s pilot phase, independently assessed in the Urbis Evaluation Report, is striking: average case resolution through mediation stands at 60 days, through conciliation at 29 days, and complex appeal arbitrations are finalised in an average of 15 days. They are achievable, the Australian experience demonstrates, precisely because the institutional design routes disputes to the appropriate mechanism, i.e., mediation for relationship-preserving matters, and arbitration for genuinely contested legal questions rather than funnelling everything through a single adjudicatory channel.
C. The United Kingdom: Sport Resolutions
The United Kingdom’s Sport Resolutions demonstrates that institutional legitimacy in sports ADR does not require the coercive machinery of a statutory tribunal to be achieved. Operating as an independent non-profit body, Sports Resolutions maintains a panel of over 300 legal, medical, financial, and safeguarding professionals, ensuring that a doping case is heard by a panel with relevant pharmacological expertise, not merely by a judge of general jurisdiction.
The procedural record is instructive: the average case duration at Sport Resolutions is under 28 days, with urgent matters resolved within days. Critically, the institution operates a dedicated Pro Bono Legal Advice Panel, a roster of specialist sports lawyers willing to assist athletes of limited financial means recognising that access to justice in sports disputes is inseparable from access to counsel. This dimension of the UK model is entirely absent from the Indian Act’s architecture, which neither creates a fee-waiver mechanism nor mandates legal aid for individual athletes appearing before the NST, especially given the sorry state of financial support to the athletes specially at the grassroot level.
The common thread across all these jurisdictions is neither accidental nor incidental. Each has prioritised institutional arbitration over statutory adjudication; each has constituted a broad roster of specialist adjudicators in place of a fixed bench; each has embedded procedural flexibility calibrated to the urgency of the dispute.
TOWARDS A REMEDY: REFORMING THE NATIONAL SPORTS TRIBUNAL
The Indian Act represents a commendable stride toward sports administration standards. However, the creation of the National Sports Tribunal requires fundamental recalibration. To genuinely serve the finite, time-sensitive careers of athletes, the tribunal must transition from a monopolized quasi-judicial tribunal into a pluralistic, arbitration-friendly institution. The biological clock of athletic achievement tolls implacably, and the legislature must build an agile institution that honours the timeline of a career rather than the timeline of a traditional court. This requires several critical structural and jurisdictional overhauls.
A. Structural and Jurisdictional Overhaul
To achieve institutional legitimacy, the legislature must address the structural defects of the tribunal. The most urgent amendment required is reconstituting the tribunal into a multi-modal dispute resolution body. Instead of a structural bottleneck caused by a fixed three-member bench, it should utilize a curated roster of at least 100 empanelled experts, including arbitrators, mediators, medical experts, and sports administrators. This allows the Secretariat to constitute flexible, concurrent single or three-member panels based on case complexity. Furthermore, in the absence of a sufficient number of tribunals, jurisdiction should stem from mandatory institutional arbitration clauses embedded in the constitutions of all recognized National Sports Bodies. This approach avoids the pitfalls that doomed previous bodies and integrates specialized resolution smoothly.
Section 22 of the Act is equally problematic. Its indiscriminate, retrospective transfer of all pending civil proceedings to a single bench is administratively unworkable. The Act must apply prospectively, utilizing a “core sports dispute” filter to explicitly exclude broadcast litigation, commercial disputes, and non-athlete employment matters. Further, establishing transparent fee structures with waivers for low-income athletes, alongside the publication of redacted awards, is vital for developing a coherent Indian sports jurisprudence.
B. Time-Sensitive Adjudication and the Athlete’s Clock
The defining variable in sports law is time. A selection dispute delayed by months can not only prejudice an athlete but also permanently extinguish a career. International bodies such as the Court of Arbitration for Sport resolve urgent disputes within hours or days, and the National Sports Tribunal must be aligned with this biological reality. To achieve this, Section 17 must prescribe binding, justiciable timelines. The law should mandate a maximum of 30 days for urgent pre-competition matters, 90 days for disciplinary proceedings, and 180 days for governance and electoral disputes. If the tribunal fails to meet these deadlines, the parties have an automatic right to approach the High Court. A deadline without consequences is merely a preference.
Additionally, every dispute should pass through a mandatory mediation gateway. Housed in a distinct wing, this process will resolve contractual and governance disputes efficiently, preserving the core adjudicatory bandwidth of the tribunal for genuinely contested legal questions. For immediate crises, the Act must mandate a permanent Emergency Division capable of a 48-hour turnaround for tournament qualification disputes, equipped to grant ex-parte interim relief. Simultaneously, the Central Government must establish regional benches in at least five major cities, such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, and Bengaluru, ensuring that geography does not obstruct access to justice. As India sets its ambitions on hosting the 2036 Olympic Games, reforming this tribunal is not merely domestic statutory housekeeping but a matter of geopolitical credibility.
(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.)