The Telangana High Court last month set aside a trial court’s order that had barred a group of land owners from challenging a National Highways Act arbitral award on grounds of delay, saying that the decision “reflects an unduly rigid approach”.
“The right to challenge an award is a substantive right; it cannot be curtailed except strictly in accordance with statute,” a division bench of Justices Abhinand Kumar Shavili and Vakiti Ramakrishna Reddy said in an order dated October 6, underscoring that the trial court had ignored both statutory law and multiple Supreme Court precedents.
The civil revision petition, involving 13 petitioners whose agricultural lands were acquired for National Highway widening, sought to challenge an arbitral award, arguing that the compensation was inadequate. They filed their challenge 27 days past the initial three-month deadline, leading the trial court to dismiss their application for condonation of delay. The trial court held that the limitation commenced when the award was dispatched to the petitioners’ advocate in May 2015.
The bench also clarified the law regarding when the period of limitation begins for challenging arbitration awards. The court ruled that under Section 31(5) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, the limitation period is only triggered upon delivery of a signed copy of the award to the party himself and that the service on an advocate is not sufficient.
Regarding the 27-day delay, which fell within the permissible 30-day grace period, the high court adopted a “justice-oriented approach rather than a hyper-technical one”. The judgment declared that the refusal to condone the delay would amount to “foreclosing judicial review of the arbitral award on technical grounds, thereby defeating the very object of the statute”.
The court remarked that in land acquisition cases, where land owners suffer compulsory deprivation of property, “technicalities of limitation should not operate as instruments of injustice”. Consequently, the high court allowed the civil revision petition, condoned the 27-day delay, and ordered the trial court to restore the original petition and dispose of the matter on its merits within six months.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
