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.
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.
In Pannalal Bhansali v. Bharti Telecom Ltd., the Supreme Court held that a company can selectively extinguish minority shareholders’ capital under Section 66 of the Companies Act, provided the valuation is fair. It settled, for the first time, the legality of using Section 66 as a squeeze-out mechanism.
The Supreme Court has referred the validity of arbitration pre-deposit clauses to a larger bench. The real question, however, is whether Article 14 of the Constitution belongs at the reference stage of an arbitration that Section 18 of the Arbitration Act or even contract law could settle.
A ruling by the top Court earlier this year affirms that criminal cases with an 'overwhelmingly civil flavour' stand on a different footing and ought to be quashed where a compromise is reached. As the legislature pursues a decriminalisation spree, it's time to expand the list of compoundable offences.
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.
