The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act, 2026 is said to be the most structurally important change in Indian Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code since its enactment in 2016.3 At the core of it is the Creditor-Initiated Insolvency Resolution Process (“CIIRP”) provided for in a new Chapter IV-A with Sections 58A to 58K.4 CIIRP establishes for the first time in the Indian law, a debtor in possession resolution track, which is initiated outside of court, with the National Company Law Tribunal (“NCLT”) playing only at the gateway, and on a creditor consent basis, rather than by court order.5 The most comparable international alternative to the debtor in possession is the Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, but the comparison must not be overstated.6
Yet however appealing the policy design may be, but the question regarding who can be let in; i.e., the gateway to CIIRP, does not appear to meet the constitutional test of safeguards, particularly the Article 14. The structure of Sections 58A and 58B leaves the most important question of who is a creditor or debtor at the heart of the matter entirely to ‘executive notification’, without providing any fixed measure or guideline. This article argues that the structure reveals three related vulnerabilities in the context of the Constitution: first, the lack of standards in the excessive delegation of powers; second, manifest arbitrariness in the exercise of the notification and enforcement powers by the subordinate authorities and third, the creation of a “class within a class” of financial creditors. The discussion starts with the threshold and the mechanics, unpacks each constitutional fault in turn and ends with the road ahead.
I. The CIIRP Threshold: What the Amendment is actually doing
The outline of the new process has to be carefully understood before scrutiny can be considered. Section 58A sets out the circumstances in which a corporate debtor can be the subject of CIIRP. It allows for initiation only when it can be determined that the corporate debtor is within “such class or classes of corporate debtors as may be notified by the Central Government” which further requires a threshold on asset or income and a further negative condition that no corporate insolvency resolution process (“CIRP”) should have been initiated under Part II, or completed, or pre-packed, within the previous 3 years.7 This is followed by a list in Section 58B of those who can initiate. The applicant shall be a financial creditor “belonging to such class of financial institutions as may be notified by the Central Government” and should get approval of financial creditors who represent not less than 51% of the debt due to such class. The creditor then has to give the corporate debtor a 30-day notice and, prior to filing, obtain a fresh 51% approval.8 After the appointment of RP, the process commences with a public announcement, no new CIRP applications can be filed on the same debtor and the existing board continues to run the company under the RP’s supervision.9 CIIRP shall be completed within one hundred and fifty days from the date of its commencement, or may be extended by another forty-five days; failure to have an approved resolution plan, or any non-cooperation by management, might result in conversion of CIIRP to CIRP.10
There are two remarkable features. The first being that the eligibility of both the debtor and the creditors is not prescribed by the statute. Parliament has not set out any class of financial institution, any asset test, any prudential indicator or any policy to test the executive’s notification power. The provision is a ‘blank cheque’ and has been presented as a statutory criterion. Secondly, the impact of going in or out of the notified class is dire: even if the creditor’s exposure is high, it has no ability to trigger CIIRP. As the commentators have pointed out, the non-notified creditor with 51% of economic exposure does not have access to the track.11 The two features combined give rise to the constitutional issues discussed below.
II. Excessive Delegation: When Rules Cannot Supplant the Statute
The first constitutional problem is due to the architecture of delegation. Excessive delegation is one of the most established settled doctrines of the Indian constitution. The legislature cannot abdicate its “essential legislative functions”, which consist of laying down policy and enacting binding rules of conduct, as Mukherjea J. noted in In re Delhi Laws Act.12 The executive can flesh out a legislative outline to fill in the gaps within a clearly-defined time frame, but cannot itself be given authority to create the policy.
Later decisions from the Supreme Court have not retreated from this stance. In Sant Ram Sharma v. State of Rajasthan, a Constitution Bench ruled that the “government is not authorized by an administrative instruction to modify or abrogate statutory rules but when a statutory rule is silent on any particular rule, it is competent to complete the lacuna and supplement the rules and issue instructions which are not inconsistent with the rules already framed.”13 Rules can’t be a substitute for the law itself or its purpose.
The case of Kunj Behari Lal Butail v. State of Himachal Pradesh gives a sharp twist to the issue of rule-making. The Supreme Court there said that a delegated power to legislate by making rules for the purposes of the Act was a “general delegation without the laying down of any guidelines”, and it cannot be so exercised as to create substantive rights or obligations or disabilities not intended by the provisions of the Act itself.14
Section 58B does just what these decisions forbid. The amendment gives the Central Government authority to notify which financial creditors will be allowed to use CIIRP. The substantive right of access, possibly the most significant right in the new chapter, is established, denied and redefined at the level of subordinate notification. Parliament has provided no measure of net worth, no prudential standard, no functional test, no minimum exposure, no test on asset class. In short, there is no policy set in the parent statute against which the notification’s validity can be assessed.15
It is here that the doctrine strikes the hardest and it is here that one of the strongest objections to Section 58B should be made. Delegation isn’t just a given. The point is that, in the structure of the IBC, there is no reason why the issue of eligible creditors should have been left to subordination in the first place. Throughout the IBC, Parliament has shown itself to have a very adequate power to delineate classes of creditors with accuracy. The definition of a ‘financial creditor’ is provided in Section 5(7), ‘financial debt’ in Section 5(8) with illustrations, ‘operational creditor’ in Section 5(20), and the composition of the committee of creditors in Section 21(2). If Parliament has so desired to specify a class of persons by reference to a regulator, it has made that express; for example, securitisation companies or reconstruction companies under SARFAESI. The IBC has a lot of apparatus for legislative classification available. The choice to exclude any such criteria in Sections 58A and 58B was a decision. The arbitrariness of the provision is especially pronounced where a choice was not necessary, where the choice of eligibility was in the hands of Parliament and should have been there.
This is also one thing that sets Section 58B apart from the style of delegation which the Supreme Court has been willing to abstain. In the case of Dharani Sugars and Chemicals Ltd. v. Union of India, the Court upheld the constitutional validity of Sections 35AA and 35AB of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, which empower RBI to direct banks to commence the insolvency proceedings under the IBC, on the basis that the parent statute along with other regulatory provisions, provided adequate guidance for the RBI to exercise the delegated powers.16 Simultaneously, the Court set aside the RBI’s Circular dated 12th February 2018 for being ultra vires of Section 35AA inasmuch as it provided directions for reference to IBC of all cases without taking into account specific defaults of specific debtors as prescribed by the parent provision.17Dharani Sugars teaches that, in otherwise well drafted delegations, failure can occur if the delegate exceeds the statutory framework; and where the framework is lacking, the failure can start at the parent provision level. The RBI had to work within the boundaries set by Parliament, as the very Prudential Framework it issued on 7th June 2019 to replace the deleted-circular demonstrates.18 The opposite case is set out in Section 58B, in which there is no contour whatsoever in the statute.
III. Manifest Arbitrariness: The Article 14 Failure
The second fault of the constitution is also related to the first but it is analytically different. Where a delegation passes the test of being an excessive delegation, any resulting framework and notification under it must meet the test of Article 14 on its own. The manifest arbitrariness doctrine, as it is called today, was first formulated in the Supreme Court in the case of Shayara Bano v. Union of India. Speaking for himself and U.U. Lalit J., Nariman J. found that manifest arbitrariness means “something done by the legislature capriciously, irrationally and/or without adequate determining principle and when something is done which is excessive and disproportionate, such legislation would be manifest arbitrariness”.19
In essence, Shayara Bano clarified that “for the purposes of Article 14 of the Indian Constitution, there is no rational distinction between subordinate legislation and plenary legislation”; both are subject to scrutiny.20 Since then, the doctrine has been restated in later constitution-bench decisions.21
The Supreme Court’s existing jurisprudence on the subject of subordinate legislation was already along the same lines. In the Cellular Operators Association of India v. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, the Court clarified that a regulation to be constitutionally valid should be the product of careful consideration and good sense and a choice of a course of action that reason dictates.22 A subordinate legislation must be the result of intelligent care and deliberation and each of the following is fatal under Article 14: capriciousness, lack of determining principle.23
Applying it to Section 58B, the test is not met. There is no limiting principle revealed in the parent statute that would limit the notification power. The court has no yardstick to consider if this certain financial creditor has been duly notified or has been wrongly not included. The exclusion of a creditor from the notified class will produce real and immediate consequences — bar on initiation, exclusion from the committee that governs the resolution under Chapter IV-A, inability to commence a debtor-in-possession track, but there will be no statutory standard to which the excluded creditor can refer for judicial review purposes.
The IBC preambulatory objectives have been sometimes used to serve as a yardstick for measuring such delegations of legislative policy. The preamble talks about the issues of consolidation, time-bound resolution, maximising value of the assets, encouraging entrepreneurship, credit availability, and balancing of interests of all stakeholders.24 Although these are good objectives, there are no specific criteria that can be applied to determine which creditors may have access to CIIRP. Resolution and value maximisation, as the end, do not on their own imply that the scheduled commercial banks should go for the CIIRP while the non-notified Asset Reconstruction Company should not or vice versa.
The Classification Question: A ‘Class Within a Class
The third constitutional error is the deepest. Regardless of any creative interpretation of the preamble that might prevail, and even if the notification could somehow be justified as not “capricious”, Section 58B still adds a sub-classification to an existing definition of the statutory class. The doctrine of “class within a class” is here put at the heart of the discussion, and it is here that the concept as a whole is most clearly unable to withstand the test of Article 14.
A. The Doctrine: Why Sub-Classifying an Existing Class is Constitutionally Suspect
Article 14 prohibits class legislation but allows reasonable classification. The classic twin test is well known: classification may be justified if it is founded on intelligible differentia and has a rational connection to the purpose to be served.25 There is a lesser-known corollary to the doctrine: If the statute has already included a class, for instance, the financial creditors, and the executive subsequently subdivided it into preferred and disfavoured sub-groups, then the sub-classification must also satisfy the twin test and be based on independent intelligible differentia and independent nexus with the object of the law. The mere constitutional classification of a particular classification does not justify further classification of it.
The apex court applied this approach in Rashbihari Panda v. State of Orissa. The Government of Orissa, while duly taking over the State monopoly of the Kendu leaf trade, came up with schemes to restrict the proportion of licensees to sell the leaves through advance purchase contracts to a segment of the existing licensees who had been satisfactory in the previous year. The Court declared the scheme unconstitutional. The vice was that the State had selected an already identified class of that traders in Kendu leaves, and by executive action gave privilege to a sub-group of that class, without there being any reasonable basis which has anything to do with the object of the legislation.
The Court made same reasoning in Bennett Coleman & Co. v. Union of India. The Newsprint Policy of 1972-73 applied page caps and differentiated quotas, effectively penalising newspapers with circulation sizes exceeding a certain level more than smaller newspapers.26 The classification, clothed in the regulatory garb, made a distinction in an already-delineated class of newspapers. The Court upheld the impugned provisions of the Newsprint Policy on the ground, among others, that such policy infringed upon Article 14 and 19(1)(a) of the Constitution because it was not for a genuine shortage of newsprint, but to control it.27 The constitutional vice was the “class within a class”: the legislature had not drawn the distinction, and the policy had no intelligible differentia related to the purpose of newsprint allocation.
Read together, Rashbihari Panda and Bennett Coleman set up a clear principle. Sub-classification of the class, when already drawn by the legislature, may not be done by subordinate action by the executive in favor of one sub-class and against the other, unless the sub-classification is based upon an intelligible differentia that has a rational nexus with the statutory object.
Application: Section 58B Creates a Sub-Class Without Differentia
Section 58B drops squarely into the Rashehari Panda pattern. IBC as passed in 2016 has identified two types of creditors: financial creditors and operational creditors; characterised as such based on the nature of their claims which operates on the basis of the time-value-of-money nature of the financial creditor’s claim and the nature of the operational creditor’s claim which is based on the trade-credit.28 In Innoventive Industries Ltd. v. ICICI Bank Ltd., the Supreme Court acknowledged this two-class framework and the policy reason.29 In Swiss Ribbons Pvt. Ltd. v. Union of India, the Court upheld the argument of the differential treatment of financial and operational creditors only because Parliament had provided the functional differentia.30
Section 58B adds a new sub-class to financial creditors: “notified” financial creditors can access CIIRP while non-notified financial creditors cannot. It is the executive that is responsible for sub-classification and not Parliament. It does not appear on the face of the statute that there is an intelligible difference between the two. No published nexus can be found between the class line eventually and the CIIRP object. The executive, by way of notification, has the discretion to declare scheduled commercial banks and certain non-banking financial companies as the “in-group”, and to exclude, at least at the threshold: Asset Reconstruction Companies, distressed-debt funds, foreign creditors who have acquired stressed paper in the secondary market, and other functional equivalents.31 The very economic players who are in a business of recognising, acquiring and solving stressed debt, in many instances, with the biggest single exposure to a corporate debtor, may be precluded from getting into the gateway.
IV. The Consequence: A Third Tier of Creditors
The above-mentioned constitutional flaws have a real impact on the structure of the insolvency regime in India: the unintended emergence of a third class of creditors. Until Section 58B, the IBC had only two functional classes of creditors with a defined position in the resolution and liquidation waterfall: financial and operational. The two-tier system has been approved by the commercial firms, Innoventive Industries and Swiss Ribbons, as both functional and constitutional.32 Section 58B carves out a tertium quid that is the non-notified financial creditor, who remains a financial creditor for the purpose of Section 5(7), and who therefore participates in CIRP (Section 7), but who may not be able to participate in CIIRP (Chapter IV-A). The rights of the non-notified financial creditors are diminished, not as a function of the economic nature of its claim, but as a function of the executive’s notification.
Practical consequences are not formal. Consider any Asset Reconstruction Company registered under Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002, (“SARFAESI”) registered with Reserve Bank of India to acquire and resolve stressed debt and having majority economic exposure on a stressed corporate debtor.33 However, the ARC is not within the notified class under Section 58B and thus may not initiate the CIIRP, regardless of whether it meets the substantive requirement of 51% of debt by value. The CIIRP track is the faster and lighter-touch debtor in possession track while the ARC is restricted to the slower, heavier CIRP track, with automatic moratorium, but where the proceedings are NCLT-led and the timeline is longer.34 The exclusion is real and the disability is real and it acts as a colorable restriction on the ARC’s right to conduct their business under Article 19(1)(g), which the Supreme Court warned of in Rashbihari Panda.35
V. Answering the Defence: Why the SEBI/RBI Analogies Fail
Defenders of Section 58B might counter that the financial regulatory system in this country is filled with eligibility provisions that are based on notification by either an executive or a regulator. The list of Qualified Institutional Buyers maintained by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) under the Issue of Capital and Disclosure Requirements Regulations (ICDRR) is the typical example; the other is the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Master Directions on Asset Reconstruction Companies (ARCs) that set the criteria for registration and net-owned-funds.36 These designations operate by way of subordinate instruments, and their legality has not, as a general matter, been seriously contested. If those frameworks survive, why not Section 58B?
The solution is in the structure of the parent statutes. In the case of SEBI, prudential indicators are provided in the parent act, and in the case of the RBI, prudential indicators are also provided in the rules that are made after appropriate deliberations and sent to Parliament. The Master Directions on ARCs have been issued under Section 3 of SARFAESI itself which lays down minimum owned funds requirements and conditions for registration wherewith the regulator’s discretion is exercised.37 The QIB framework is embedded in the ‘ICDR Regulations’ which define the categories of institutional investors through references to statutory recognition, capital adequacy and regulatory status, each of which are publicly available criteria for testing a notification.38 To put it simply, they all have in common, and don’t have in Section 58B: a published yardstick. The notification is within a framework of criteria.
VI. A Comparative Note: Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code
The point can be sharpened by comparison with the Chapter 11 framework that the CIIRP design is said to emulate. An involuntary case can be commenced by filing a petition by the claimants who meet certain statutory requirements under Section 303 of Title 11 of the U.S. Code. If the debtor has 12 or more holders of qualifying claims, 3 or more qualifying holders whose claims are at least a specified dollar amount may file the petition; if the debtor has fewer than 12 holders, a single qualifying holder may file.39 Eligibility, that is, is claim-based and not identity-based. The gateway is open to all holders of a non-contingent claim of the necessary amount, including commercial banks, hedge funds, asset reconstruction companies, indenture trustees and bondholders.
The Indian amendment simply reverses this design. CIIRP is not based on the nature and size of the claim but rather on the identity of the creditor, the “notified class of financial institutions”. A creditor with a large undisputed claim can be excluded if it is not a member of the class of creditors, while a creditor with a smaller claim, who is part of the class, can be included. The substantive distinction thus loads onto the gateway for the Indian model and the U.S. model addresses it with neutral criteria based on claims.
The Road Ahead
The most notable aspect of the Section 58B is that it remains unfinalised. Perhaps intentionally, the provision was drafted to let the ‘what is it’ question be left to a time of executive decision that has yet to come. A creditor-led, time-bound debtor-in-possession process is indeed available. Fifty-one per cent creditor approval works. The time frame of 150 days is significant. However, the gateway is void of any standards in the middle, and this hollowness gives rise to three constitutional challenges: excessive delegation of authority without standards; manifest arbitrariness in any notification to be issued; and the impermissible character of the “class within a class” of financial creditors.
This is a series of open questions left behind, and it is here that the work of the next phase begins by asking these questions. If Parliament goes back to Chapter IV-A and makes it easier for it to use statutory amendment to provide at the beginning the eligibility rules that it should have provided: net worth, capital adequacy, regulatory licence, minimum exposure, or some defensible combination? Should the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India use its regulation-making powers under Sections 196 and 240 to fill the void, although such regulations would themselves be vulnerable to a Kunj Behari Lal Butail challenge if they go beyond ‘details’ and bring into existence substantive rights or disabilities not contemplated by the parent statute?40 Or will the initial CIIRP notices be issued and get immediate challenges from the people who fall short of the requirements, which, if filed aggressively, could prevent the new chapter from fully coming into effect at the time it was intended to?
There are also a more subdued set of questions. If section 58B is allowed in its current form or in an accommodating form, the resulting unequal treatment of financial creditors will create a class of financial creditors who are not notified who will have lesser rights of participation in the new resolution track as compared to the other financial creditors. What will that anomaly mean to the Adjudicating Authorities when they face it? Will the Supreme Court read down the notification power of the executive and impose a “deliberation and intelligence” requirement on the executive as Cellular Operators had asked the TRAI to impose?41 Will the Court rely on Rashbihari Panda and Bennett Coleman and find that the sub-classification must meet an independent intelligible differentia test and what will occur to a notification that fails to meet this test?
The reason behind the enactment of the CIIRP is logical, namely that it will help achieve faster resolution, cost reduction, maintenance of the continuity of management in the event of value addition and lighten burden on the NCLT. It is not a fault of those objectives in themselves. It was the executive’s choice to not notify the IBC about the access issue, the doctrine of delegated legislation and the need for a constitutional article (article 14) that did the rest, for they each seemed to be pointing in different directions. That is open now as to whether it’s going to be cured by Parliament, whether it’s going to be resolved by the regulator or whether it’s going to be resolved in court. What is no longer open is the suspicion with which Section 58B should be read: a centrepiece of the 2026 amendment that may, on closer constitutional inspection, turn out to rest on a fault line of its own making.
1 AOR, Supreme Court of India and Founder Partner, Lectio Law Offices LLP
2 Advocate and PGIP-LLM Student, National Law University Delhi.
3 For an overview of the structural significance of the 2026 amendment, see Kumar Saurabh Singh & Aditi Bagri, IBC Amendment Act 2026: Architecture of a new insolvency order — What changes and how to structure around it [Part I], Bar & Bench (24 April 2026); see also Khaitan & Co., Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act, 2026: A Structural Shift (FoxMandal Note).
4 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act 2026, Clauses 39–40 (omitting the erstwhile fast-track Chapter IV of Part II and inserting Sections 58A–58K constituting the new Chapter IV-A). See IBC Laws, President Assents to Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act, 2026 (7 April 2026).
5 The defining structural features of CIIRP are summarised in the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India’s discussion paper preceding the CIIRP Regulations, 2026. See IBBI, Discussion Paper on the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (Creditor-Initiated Insolvency Resolution Process) Regulations, 2026 (April 2026).
6 11 U.S.C. § 303 (governing involuntary cases under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code). For a discussion of the analogy and its limits, see Singh & Bagri, supra note 1.
7 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act 2026, Section 58A (inserting Chapter IV-A). For a summary of the eligibility criteria, see CorpLaw Updates, IBC Amendment Act 2026: Complete Guide — Creditor-Initiated IRP, Group Insolvency, New Timelines & Key Changes.
8 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act 2026, Section 58B; see Khaitan & Co., supra note 1 (noting the fifty-one per cent threshold and the thirty-day notice requirement).
9 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act 2026, Sections 58B–58F. See Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act, 2026: A Comprehensive Analysis, Bar & Bench (May 2026).
10 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act 2026, Sections 58D, 58H.
11 Singh & Bagri, (observing that “a non-notified creditor holding 51% of the economic exposure simply cannot access the track”).
12 In re Delhi Laws Act, 1912, AIR 1951 SC 332. Mukherjea J. (and the majority) recognised that essential legislative functions, comprising the determination of legislative policy and its formulation as a binding rule of conduct, cannot be delegated.
13 Sant Ram Sharma v. State of Rajasthan, AIR 1967 SC 1910, (1968) 1 SCR 111 (per Ramaswami J. for a Constitution Bench).
14 Kunj Behari Lal Butail v. State of Himachal Pradesh, (2000) 3 SCC 40, AIR 2000 SC 1069, paragraph 14 (per R.C. Lahoti J.).
15 This is the central thrust of the modern decisions on subordinate legislation. See General Officer Commanding-in-Chief v. Subhash Chandra Yadav, (1988) 2 SCC 351 (subordinate legislation is invalid if it falls outside the rule-making power conferred by the parent statute, or is in conflict with it, or is manifestly arbitrary).
16 Dharani Sugars and Chemicals Ltd. v. Union of India, (2019) 5 SCC 480. See also L. Viswanathan, Madhav Kanoria & Kapil Arora, Dharani Sugars v. Union of India: RBI’s Regulatory Powers Re-affirmed by the Supreme Court, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (3 April 2019).
17 Dharani Sugars, (2019) 5 SCC 480 (striking down the Reserve Bank of India’s Circular dated 12 February 2018 in its entirety as ultra vires Section 35AA of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949).
18 Reserve Bank of India, Prudential Framework for Resolution of Stressed Assets (7 June 2019).
19 Shayara Bano v. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1, paragraph 101 (Nariman J., for himself and Lalit J., with Kurian Joseph J. concurring on this point).
20 Id., paragraphs 94–101. See also the discussion of Shayara Bano’s expansion of manifest arbitrariness to plenary legislation in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India, (2024) 5 SCC 214 (Electoral Bonds case).
21 Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, (2018) 10 SCC 1 (Constitution Bench, applying the manifest-arbitrariness test to strike down Section 377 IPC in part); Joseph Shine v. Union of India, (2019) 3 SCC 39 (Constitution Bench, manifest arbitrariness as a ground for invalidating legislation).
22 Cellular Operators Association of India v. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, (2016) 7 SCC 703, paragraph 38.
23 Id., paragraphs 35–46. The Court drew on Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Pvt. Ltd. v. Union of India, (1985) 1 SCC 641, and on Sharma Transport v. Government of A.P., (2002) 2 SCC 188, for the proposition that subordinate legislation may be struck down for manifest arbitrariness.
24 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016, Preamble.
25 State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar, AIR 1952 SC 75; Ram Krishna Dalmia v. Justice Tendolkar, AIR 1958 SC 538 (the classic twin test of intelligible differentia and rational nexus).
26 Bennett Coleman & Co. v. Union of India, (1972) 2 SCC 788, AIR 1973 SC 106.
27 Id., paragraphs 76–93. The Court held that the page caps and circulation restrictions in the Newsprint Policy were not justified by any genuine shortage and violated Articles 19(1)(a) and 14.
28 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016, Sections 5(7), 5(8), 5(20), 5(21).
29 Innoventive Industries Ltd. v. ICICI Bank Ltd., (2018) 1 SCC 407, paragraphs 25–28 (recognising the two-tier classification of creditors under the IBC).
30 Swiss Ribbons Pvt. Ltd. v. Union of India, (2019) 4 SCC 17, paragraphs 27–55 (sustaining the differential treatment of financial and operational creditors on the basis of functional differentia rooted in Parliament’s classification).
31 Singh & Bagri, supra note 1 (observing that “the class of notified financial creditors will likely be dominated by scheduled commercial banks and major NBFCs, potentially excluding distressed debt funds, ARCs, and foreign creditors who have purchased stressed debt in the secondary market”).
32 Innoventive Industries, (2018) 1 SCC 407; Swiss Ribbons, (2019) 4 SCC 17.
33 Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act 2002, Section 3 (registration of securitisation companies or reconstruction companies).
34 For a comparative summary of the procedural posture and timelines of CIRP and CIIRP under the 2026 amendment, see Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, supra note 7, and Khaitan & Co., supra note 1.
35 Rashbihari Panda, AIR 1969 SC 1081, paragraph 16 (“both the schemes evolved by the Government were violative of the fundamental right of the petitioners under Article 19(1)(g) and Article 14 because the schemes gave rise to a monopoly in the trade … to certain traders, and singled out other traders for discriminatory treatment”).
36 SEBI (Issue of Capital and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations 2018 (defining “qualified institutional buyer” and prescribing the regulatory and prudential indicators for inclusion in the category); see also Reserve Bank of India, Master Direction — Reserve Bank of India (Asset Reconstruction Companies) Directions, 2024.
37 SARFAESI 2002, Sections 3, 4 (registration and conditions of registration of asset reconstruction companies, including minimum owned-fund thresholds).
38 SEBI (Issue of Capital and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations 2018, Regulation 2(1)(ss).
39 11 U.S.C. § 303(b).
40 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016, Sections 196 and 240; Kunj Behari Lal Butail, (2000) 3 SCC 40, paragraph 14.
41 Cellular Operators, (2016) 7 SCC 703, paragraph 38.