The Competition Commission of India (CCI)'s recent proposed amendments (Draft Amendments) to the Competition Commission of India (Commitment) Regulations, 2024 are administrative housekeeping in nature. The Draft Amendments extend the window to file from 45 days to 60 days, allow for curing defects for 10 days, clarify fees, and increase the overall timeline from 130 to 180 working days. Each of those changes is commonsensical. But every one is a change to time, and none touches the three features that actually determine whether a commitment is genuine: the evidentiary basis on which it is built, the kind of case that is eligible to enter the channel, and the machinery by which it is enforced once accepted. Where this regime is hard, is because it raises difficult questions of structure. The Draft Amendments answer a procedural one. Section 48B of the Competition Act, 2002 permits an enterprise subjected to an inquiry under Section 26(1) for an alleged contravention of Section 3(4) (vertical agreements) or Section 4 (abuse of dominance) to tender commitments; upon acceptance, the proceeding terminates without a finding that there has been a contravention. That single characteristic is the source of its attractiveness, and of its challenge. A commitment order puts things right without passing judgment, binds without determining legal question, and regulates future behaviour without setting a precedent. The Draft Amendments ought to be evaluated not by whether they make the channel smoother, but whether they safeguard the public-law character of a form of government, at the end of the day regulation by consent. Sixty days is a practical timeframe for creating a remedy that can be monitored effectively. A ten-day solution is valid if it addresses the issue at hand instead of relying on an ambiguous fix. The option of extending the period to 180 days is reasonable, provided that this extra time enhances scrutiny rather than making it less thorough. Still, each option affects the pace, and speed has never been the primary restriction on maintaining the integrity of the system.
A Remedy Seeking Justification
The commitment process begins at the Section 26(1) phase, occurring before any investigation by the Director General takes place, prior to any reports being generated or relevant markets being identified. The CCI accepts remedies aligned with concerns they have recognised but not yet verified. This mechanism allows for quick resolutions while sacrificing proof.
This situation creates a proportionality dilemma in two ways. In absence of solid evidence, regulators struggle to determine whether a remedy fails to address issues sufficiently potentially allowing a dominant company to resolve matters easily or overshoots its goal by demanding excessive concessions that could not be justified under normal circumstances, amid an ongoing inquiry's pressure. A remedy disconnected from established harm risks being either too lenient or excessively punitive without any clear standard for assessment.
The European Union (EU) faced this exact challenge as outlined in Article 9 of Regulation 1/2003, which serves as a guiding framework here. In Commission v Alrosa (C-441/07 P), the Court of Justice found that the Commission need not establish an infringement, but rather only a test against the Commission's concerns in its preliminary assessment, and that proportionality applies less stringently than in a full decision, since the undertaking is taken to have consciously accepted concessions that could not be extracted after an in-depth examination. The price of solving a case without proof, then, is a diminished check on whether a remedy fits the wrong. India imported the trap without tackling it, and fifty extra working days supply nothing: what is missing is proof, not time.
The Cases the Channel Will Attract
It is not sufficient, however, to say that there are a subset of cases that should not be settled. The sharper question is which cases a rational enterprise will seek to steer into the channel for tactically beneficial closure, and the answer predicts, not a failure of discretion, but a structural distortion. There will be two dominant categories. The first is the case the firm expects to lose; strong evidence and a serious penalty hovering mean that a no-fault order is an appealing escape. The second is the doctrinally novel case; where the law is unsettled, the firm would rather not create precedent that ties its industry to a certain course; here a commitment buys not just closure, but doctrinal silence. Both are precisely the cases where a public ruling will matter most, where deterrence depends on findings and guidance depends on precedent. Left to incentives, the channel will juice away the highest value adjudications. That's not a discretion problem but an adverse-selection problem and it can't be managed case by case because the incentive runs the same way every time. The EU bears it out: after 2004, commitment decisions came to dominate abuse-of-dominance enforcement, the very category in which doctrine was needed to be built. The Draft Amendments widen the funnel without a filter at its mouth. The CCI should publish suitability criteria that reserve for adjudication (regardless of how attractive the offer) cases of unsettled law, structural harm, and nascent digital markets. The line has to be a rule, not a mood.
The Silences on Testing and Enforcement
Two further omissions follow from the same root. Because the route switches off the Director General's fact-finding, the non-confidential version of the commitments put to rivals and consumers becomes the regulator's sole surviving channel for learning whether a remedy will successfully restore contestability. Market testing is not a courtesy; it is the last means of error-correction on a remedy that is about to be made binding without proof. A thin disclosure guts it, yet the Draft Amendments on it say nothing.
The second omission is enforcement. The second of the new three-headed regime, Section 48C, lets the CCI “revoke” its order, and recover costs of up to rupees 1 crore, for appeal, non-compliance, non-disclosure, or a change of facts materially inconsistent with the commitment, and restore the Commissioner's findings of fact, putting the investigation back where it left off. On paper this does discipline compliance; in practice the threat is temporally hollow. “Restoration” pulls an inquiry under Section 26(1), dormant for the life of the commitment and by then of stone age vintage. The trail is cold, and the evidence the route let the firm avoid generating was never generated. The sanction points back to an investigation aged into impotence. The cure is not retrofitted. It is built into the acceptance: measurable obligations, fixed milestones, independent audit where the remedy is behavioural, and graduated consequence short of full revocation. A durable correction is built at acceptance, not retrofitted by resuscitating a corpse.
For a channel that trades proof, selection discipline, and enforceable monitoring for speed and consent, Draft Amendments that improve speed and consent, the easy side, and leave untouched the other three, is too easy. A faster channel saves time only if it's paired with a published suitability doctrine, transparency that makes market testing real, and monitoring that is set at acceptance rather than after breach. The point of a commitment is not that it helps an enterprise to leave an investigation, it is that it leaves the market healthier than the investigation found it. Procedural flexibility is worth creating. Market-correction is the real test.
Author is a third-year B.A.LL.B. student at Dr. RMLNLU, Lucknow. Views are personal.