The Delhi High Court has dismissed an application filed by Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. (IOCL) seeking amendment of the prayer clause in its petition under Section 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, holding that such an amendment would impermissibly revive a time-barred challenge and deprive the opposite party of accrued rights.
The application arose wherein IOCL had challenged an arbitral award dated February 25, 2023, passed by a three-member tribunal comprising Justices Madan B. Lokur (Retd.), Badar Durrez Ahmed (Retd.) and Pradeep Nandrajog (Retd.), in a dispute with Suzlon Energy Ltd.
Originally, IOCL’s Section 34 petition was confined to challenging the tribunal’s findings on specific issues. By way of the present application under Order VI Rule 17 of the CPC, IOCL sought to amend the prayer clause to additionally assail Issue No. 1, under which the arbitral tribunal had directed IOCL to pay ₹8.43 crore to Suzlon towards pending milestone payments.
IOCL contended that the omission to challenge Issue No. 1 in the original prayer clause was inadvertent, and that the pleadings and grounds in the body of the petition already contained a substantive challenge to that issue. Reliance was also placed on an earlier order of the High Court issuing notice, where the Court had recorded that the challenge extended to multiple claims including Claim No. 1.
Suzlon Energy (Respondent), however, opposed the amendment, arguing that Section 34(3) of the A&C Act prescribes a strict limitation period of three months, extendable by only thirty days, and that IOCL’s attempt to include Issue No. 1 at this stage was an effort to resurrect a challenge that had become barred by limitation. It was submitted that once the limitation period had expired, Respondent had acquired a valuable right to enforce the award under Section 36 of the Act.
Justice Subramonium Prasad, after examining the statutory scheme and settled law on amendments, held that while courts generally adopt a liberal approach to amendments, such latitude cannot extend to permitting amendments that revive time-barred claims or extinguish accrued rights of the opposite party. The Court distinguished precedents where amendments to grounds were allowed, noting that in the present case IOCL sought to expand the scope of the challenge itself by adding a new relief against an unchallenged portion of the award.
The Court emphasised that allowing the amendment would effectively relate the challenge to Issue No. 1 back to the date of filing of the original petition, thereby defeating the limitation prescribed under Section 34(3) and obstructing Respondent’s right to execute the award for ₹8.43 crore.
Holding that such an amendment could not be permitted, the High Court dismissed the application.
Appearances:
For the Petitioner: Mr. Abhinav Vashisht, Sr. Adv., Mr. Sakya Singha Chaudhary, Ms. Astha Sharma, Ms. Astha Sehgal and Mr. Aditya Pratap Singh, Advs.
For the Respondent : Mr. Shashank Garg, Sr. Adv., Mr Aman Gupta, Mr Anup Kashyap, Ms. Nishtha Jain and Mr. Divyam Kandhari, Advs
