Challenges of Enforcing Arbitration Awards in India

India's enforcement problem is not primarily doctrinal: since 1996 the arbitration framework has been repeatedly refined to favour enforcement. The real problem is the State's dual role architect of India's arbitration regime, and, disproportionately, its most reluctant litigant. Using the decade-long Delhi Metro arbitration as its central case study, this paper traces one institutional reflex across three episodes treaty terminations in 2016–17, a 2024 Finance Ministry memorandum discouraging arbitration in government contracts, and a widening gap in sovereign immunity doctrine in which the State retreats from arbitration precisely when it stands to lose. Even award-holders who win face a second, quieter battle: enforcing against a State that has never legislated when its immunity is actually waived. The paper closes with reforms aimed at what is actually broken: not the law, but the State's willingness to be bound by it.