Indian Mediation Week, 2018,

About the event

Awareness about mediation has been the key challenge in India. According to an access to justice survey done by Daksh, more than 54 percent of the people in India are not aware that mediation exists. We have taken up an initiative to combat this challenge and we need your support for the same.

NUJS, Kolkata is organizing the first ever Indian Mediation Week, a pan-India mediation awareness event, from 10-16 December, 2018. The event is officially being supported by Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India and Supreme Court Mediation and Conciliation Project Committee (MCPC). Hon'ble Justice Madan Lokur, Supreme Court of India,  has agreed to be the chief mentor of this event. Hon'ble Justice Dipak Misra has been invited to be the patron in chief of Indian Mediation Week. Please check out the website for more details-(http://indianmediationweek.com/index.php)

There was a strong social media campaign being run for mediation on the theme of "Suljhao Magar Pyaar Se" (translation: Resolve, amicably) on Facebook which saw support from the former Law Minister Mr. Salman Khurshid, the Hon'ble Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur as well as K.N Tripathi, Governor of West Bengal and Sushil Kumar Modi, Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar. The campaign received international recognition from luminaries including Mr. Daniel Erdmann, Founder of World Mediation Organization, Thomas Valenti from Valenti Law, Rahim Shamji from ADR-ODR London to Young Mediators Initiative of International Mediation Institute (IMI) along with Mediators in South Korea, Australia, USA etc. The final social media reach was 1,04,000.

The closing ceremony saw the presence of eminent dignitaries such as Hon'ble Justice Somadder, Hon'ble Justice Sen, Hon'ble Justice Chatterjee, Solicitor General, Judicial Secretary, senior mediators from Bombay, as well as senior advocates from the Calcutta High Court. There was an open forum to discuss various issues of critical importance in the field of mediation: need for quality mediation training, infrastructure support, need for mandatory mediation training programme in law schools, setting up a private mediation centre in Kolkata, role of advocates in increasing the usage of mediation etc. The top 3 students ambassadors, Sharanya Singh Mishra, Aman Dandotiya and Amra Qzai, were felicitated in the closing ceremony. They were chosen on the number of people sensitized and number of cases received.

This year IMW is planning to conduct more than 1000 drives and to reach more than a lakh people to tell them about out of court settlements. Unfortunately, conducting these drives requires a lot of fund for which we are seeking your help.

Here is an opportunity for you to become "Partners" to the first ever Indian Mediation Week and join this mediation movement of India.

ADR centers such as International Centre of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ICADR), Centre of Advanced Mediation Practice (CAMP), Delhi Dispute Resoluiton Society (DDRS), Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) have already partnered with the Indian Mediation Week and shown support for this cause. 

Why should you sponsor?

Target-1000 Mediation Awareness Drives

Last year, IMW operated completely out of Kolkata and had student ambassadors from 10 cities helping in the coordination of bringing together other cities for the movement. In two months, 126 mediation awareness drives were conducted with 200 volunteers working in 10 cities across India and sensitizing over ten thousand people by encouraging them to adopt mediation as a method of dispute resolution. The report of last year is available athttp://indianmediationweek.com/report.html

The plan this year is for Team IMW'18 to make a personal physical presence in 4 cities during the week and of course, increase the number of student ambassadors to involve more cities. The plan is to hit 4 metropolitan cities, Kolkata, New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai and hopefully expand to more if we manage to do so. The aim is also to bring other cities that were not previously on the map to join the movement. The target number of mediation drives to be held in India is now 1000. This entails an increase in the number of student ambassadors, resources, workload, events, partners, collaborations etc. 

It was not just a 7 day event, but the beginning of a journey of taking India back to its original method of dispute resolution: Suljhao, Magar Pyar Se. Please support us to help in making Alternative Dispute Resolution success.

Rohit Sharma

ODRways is working towards promoting mediation in India through integration with technology, and is a venture by a law student and an engineer who are committed to bringing reforms to the Indian Justice System. Domain is our initiative towards making mediation services easily accessible to the common man in India. It is an online mediator's platform having presence in 21 cities across India, with 79 mediators and has 100 plus mediations in less than 4 months and is one of the top 12 ADR centres in India recognized by the Union Ministry of Law and Justice. We hope to make mediation the primary method of dispute resolution in India.

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