India’s sporting underperformance has rarely been a talent problem. It has been a governance problem. Federations entangled in litigation, administrators entrenched beyond accountability, and dispute resolution mechanisms that existed in name only these have been the real barriers between India’s athletes and the world stage. The National Sports Governance Act, 2025 confronts all of this head on. Through the introduction of mandatory term limits, transparency obligations, athlete welfare protections, and a dedicated National Sports Tribunal (NST), the Government of India and the Indian Olympic Committee have delivered the most ambitious sports governance reform in the country’s history, a genuine, overdue achievement.
The Act has also been scrutinised for a related concern: whether establishing a domestic Tribunal alongside conditional appeals to both the Supreme Court and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) creates an institutional conflict with international sports law. That concern, it turns out, is largely overstated. Sections 20 and 25 of the Act, read together, build a carefully sequenced architecture: the NST handles domestic disputes, CAS retains appellate authority wherever ISB statutes mandate it, and the Supreme Court fills in only where CAS jurisdiction does not arise. International sports law operates as a transnational, contractually based private order and the Act embeds itself within that order rather than competing with it.
The harder problem lies closer to home.
The domestic gap: National sports tribunals and dispute resolution committees
The Act establishes two domestic dispute resolution tiers. First, internal Dispute Resolution Committees (DRCs), which every National Sports Body (NSB) must constitute under Section 4(d). Second, the NST under Section 17(1). The relationship between them is where the Act goes quiet.
Section 20 defines the NST’s jurisdiction negatively: the Tribunal cannot hear matters that fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of an internal DRC. This carve out is structurally sound, it prevents the NST from encroaching on matters reserved for the sports body’s own processes. But the Act says nothing affirmative about what the DRC’s jurisdiction actually is. That question is deferred entirely to each NSB’s bye laws and the charters of the relevant International Sports Body (ISB).
Since international sports law is a contractual, private regulatory order, ISBs approach DRC jurisdiction very differently. World Athletics grants its member NSBs near-total discretion to define their DRC’s remit. An NSB could in principle vest so much jurisdiction in its DRC that the NST is effectively locked out of any dispute. FIFA’s DRC provisions, by contrast, are limited to employment related matters; non-employment disputes fall outside the FIFA DRC framework and directly into whatever domestic mechanism the NSB adopts, which, not being ISB mandated, may not qualify as a DRC under the Act at all. United World Wrestling routes disputes through a Disciplinary Officer who decides whether the DRC applies, with jurisdiction limited to federation rule violations. The result: an athlete challenging a selection decision in athletics, football, and wrestling faces three structurally different legal routes for functionally the same grievance.
Two further silences compound the problem. Section 23 bars civil courts from entertaining matters within the NST’s jurisdiction, a sensible exclusion. No equivalent bar protects DRC proceedings, leaving those proceedings exposed to civil court interference. And Section 25, which maps appellate routes cleanly from the NST to either CAS or the Supreme Court, says nothing at all about appeals from DRC decisions. A party aggrieved by a DRC order has no statutory appellate remedy, a lacuna that is difficult to justify in a law designed to professionalise sports dispute resolution.
What the UK, Australia and New Zealand do
The comparative picture is instructive. Australia’s National Sports Tribunal does not assert first instance jurisdiction at all. Internal dispute resolution within the sports body is the mandatory first forum; the Tribunal steps in only where both parties opt in. This respects the contractual nature of athlete federation relationships, preserves sports body autonomy, and keeps the Tribunal as a backstop rather than a gatekeeper. New Zealand follows a similar model, requiring explicit recognition in a body’s bye-laws before the national tribunal can act. The UK imposes no overarching statutory framework, leaving sports bodies entirely free to structure internal resolution as they see fit. In each case, the internal mechanism is primary and the national institution is residual, precisely the sequencing the NSG Act intends but does not enforce.
Recommendations
The gap is real but correctable. Three targeted amendments would close it.
First, Section 4(1)(d) to be amended to vest DRCs with first-instance jurisdiction over all disputes arising within the NSB, regardless of how broadly or narrowly the applicable ISB bye-laws frame the DRC’s mandate. This establishes a clear, uniform domestic default and means no athlete is left without a first forum simply because their federation’s international charter is silent or narrow on DRC scope.
Second, Section 20(b)(i) should be amended to make exhaustion of DRC proceedings a mandatory precondition for approaching the NST. The Tribunal thus becomes the appellate body for DRC decisions, except where ISB statutes already provide an alternate appellate forum, in which case that forum governs. This aligns the domestic hierarchy with the logic already embedded in international sports arbitration: internal first, external appellate. It is, in fact, the architecture the Act appears to intend when read as a whole, and the amendment simply makes that intent explicit.
Third, a provision mirroring Section 23 should extend civil court exclusion to DRC proceedings, and Section 25 should be amended to provide a clear appellate path from DRC decisions to the NST. These two changes close the protection gap and the remedy gap simultaneously, ensuring the domestic dispute resolution chain is as coherent as the international one.
The government and the IOC, who have already demonstrated the institutional ambition to push through a reform of this scale, are well-placed to drive these refinements through subordinate legislation or a targeted amendment. The IOC in particular could usefully champion model DRC procedural rules across NSBs, reducing the fragmentation that currently flows from disparate ISB bye-laws and providing athletes with baseline procedural guarantees regardless of which sport they compete in.
The NSG Act 2025 has been rightly praised for integrating India into the transnational sports governance framework without generating institutional conflict with CAS. That is a genuine accomplishment. The remaining task is to match that international sophistication with an equally coherent domestic sequencing a clear, mandatory hierarchy from DRC to NST, with protected proceedings and defined appellate routes at every step. With three targeted amendments, India’s dispute resolution architecture can be as world-class as the reform ambitions that produced the Act itself.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
