Volume 8, Issue 2 / 2026

The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is spearheading India’s move towards a single digital health system. This paper reviews the structures of India’s digital public infrastructure for health and maps the interdependencies that arise at the macro level (policy making) and the micro level (clinical care) of clinical data governance and interoperability. It examines the consequences of digital fragmentation, namely information asymmetry, redundant clinical testing and flawed policy design, and how these must be addressed to realise the National Digital Health Blueprint of 2019 in conjunction with the National Health Stack proposed by NITI Aayog. Public–private networks, the Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) unique identifier, the operationalisation of the Health Information Exchange and the legal constraints imposed by the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 are also analysed. The paper concludes with recommendations for an overall system to overcome federal database silos, a standardised approach to technology procurement, and a fair and privacy-protecting national health system.

Non-performing assets (NPAs) remain a significant challenge for the Indian banking sector. Although the legal framework for recovery has become progressively more sophisticated through the Recovery of Debts and Bankruptcy Act, 1993, the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002 (SARFAESI Act) and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (IBC), recovery-oriented mechanisms often become central only after financial distress has already hardened into default. This article examines whether alternative dispute resolution (ADR), particularly mediation and arbitration, can operate earlier in the life cycle of banking stress and thereby reduce the progression of viable stressed accounts into prolonged recovery disputes. It argues that mediation has stronger preventive potential than arbitration because it can facilitate confidential, interest-based negotiations concerning restructuring, repayment, compromise and the preservation of going-concern value. Arbitration remains useful for arbitrable contractual disputes, but its scope is constrained where legislation assigns jurisdiction to specialised statutory forums. The article analyses the Mediation Act, 2023, the RBI framework on stressed-asset resolution and compromise settlements, and the interaction of ADR with the SARFAESI Act, the Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT) and the IBC. It also examines the 2026 Patna High Court decision in M/s EAEI Transformers Private Limited v. Reserve Bank of India as a practical illustration of the value and limits of consensual, ADR-assisted banking recovery. The article proposes a ten-stage banking mediation model linking early-warning identification, viability assessment, mediation, institutional approval, settlement documentation and monitoring, while preserving statutory recovery remedies if negotiations fail. The central proposition is that ADR should not replace statutory recovery; rather, it should form a time-bound, selective and commercially informed layer within a graduated banking recovery architecture.

The increasing globalisation of corporate activity has transformed the relationship between international law and corporate sustainability. Contemporary challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, labour exploitation, human rights violations and corruption transcend national boundaries and require coordinated legal and regulatory responses. This paper examines the evolving role of international law and treaties in shaping corporate sustainability, with particular emphasis on the interaction between binding international instruments and non-binding soft-law standards. It analyses the influence of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, International Labour Organization conventions, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and emerging sustainability-related frameworks. The study further examines how international norms are incorporated into domestic legal systems and subsequently translated into enforceable corporate obligations through legislation, judicial decisions, regulatory mechanisms and contractual arrangements. Particular attention is given to corporate human-rights and environmental due diligence, ESG disclosure, climate accountability and the growing extraterritorial reach of sustainability regulation. The analysis is supported by case studies including Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell, corporate due-diligence developments in France and Germany, the OECD National Contact Point mechanism, Microsoft’s human-rights practices and the Bangladesh Accord. The paper argues that international law is progressively moving beyond its traditional state-centric character and becoming an important determinant of corporate behaviour. The convergence of hard law, soft law, market expectations and judicial accountability demonstrates that sustainability is increasingly a legal, governance and strategic imperative for corporations seeking long-term resilience and responsible value creation.