In his new monthly column for The Leaflet, ‘Relief Pending’, lawyer Anirudh Gotety seeks to examine the state of private law adjudication in India and highlight gaps in private and commercial law with a view to informing policy reform.
Forty years since the Consumer Protection Act’s enactment, the line separating what is, and is not, a ‘commercial purpose’ in business-to-business transactions remains unclear, adding on to the worrying state of our consumer disputes redressal system.
A recent Delhi High Court ruling confirmed the sanctity of Long Stop Dates in M&A agreements. But it adds to a worrying trend of Indian courts expounding on private and contract law concepts through arbitration proceedings only.
When Parliament used ‘may’ in Section 7 and ‘shall’ in Section 9 of the IBC, it created a fissure that the Supreme Court traversed in Vidarbha Industries – vesting the NCLT with a discretion that fractured consistency across benches. Nine years on, the 2025 amendment bill seeks to close that fissure.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Nagaraj Mylandla does more than uphold a foreign award. It imports a doctrine that could finally stop award-debtors from treating Indian courts as a second appellate forum.
