India has spent two decades trying to move disputes out of overloaded courts and into consensual processes. That effort has gone through three phases. Section 89 of the Code of Civil Procedure 1908 introduced court-annexed referral to alternative dispute resolution. Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act 2015 then made pre-institution mediation a precondition to filing most commercial suits. The Mediation Act 2023 followed, adopting a consent-based default for civil disputes while the proviso to section 5(1) preserves the compulsory commercial gateway. This paper traces that trajectory and asks whether compulsory pre-litigation mediation advances access to justice or adds a procedural hurdle that delays vindication of rights. It situates India against two comparators, England and Wales and Italy, and against a domestic comparator, the pre-litigation conciliation conducted by Permanent Lok Adalats. The paper argues that the legitimacy of mandatory mediation depends on design rather than principle. Compulsion is defensible where the process is time-bound, inexpensive, institutionally staffed and leaves urgent relief untouched. It is indefensible where it operates as a ritual gateway. Drawing on the Supreme Court’s decisions in Patil Automation, Yamini Manohar, Dhanbad Fuels and Novenco, the paper proposes a calibrated model built around consent-sensitive gateways, a narrow and well-defined urgency exception, a mediator-capacity guarantee, cost and delay safeguards, a clear relationship between section 12A and the Mediation Act 2023, and evidence-led review through public data.