Eight days is a short window in Indian arbitration, but this one carried an unusual amount of weight. India's arbitration news cycle this week ran from a Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling on the Indus Waters Treaty, through a very public disagreement between two former Supreme Court judges over the future of award challenges, and into a run of High Court decisions that touch nearly every corner of commercial practice: enforcement, interim relief, forensic audits, construction delay, and even copyright arbitrability. Below is a consolidated account of what happened, organised the way a busy attorney would want it - by theme, not by date - with the practical read on each item.
The Indus Waters Treaty fight spills into September
The week opened with the most geopolitically charged arbitration story India has seen this year. On 31 August, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague issued a supplemental award holding that the Indus Waters Treaty remains in force and that India's suspension of the treaty - announced after the Pahalgam terror attack - had no legal basis under the tribunal's reading of the treaty framework. India's Ministry of External Affairs rejected the ruling outright, repeating its longstanding position that the Court of Arbitration was “illegally constituted” and that India never recognised its jurisdiction, never appeared before it, and would not be bound by anything it produced.
The story did not end there. On 1 September, the tribunal went further, ruling that the treaty remains binding and restricting construction activity at India's Ratle hydroelectric project pending a decision from a World Bank-appointed neutral expert - a process not expected to conclude before July 2027. India's response was consistent: continued non-participation, a repeated rejection of jurisdiction, and no change in its practical posture on the ground.
For a portal that covers institutional and commercial arbitration, a treaty dispute between sovereigns might seem like a tangent. It isn't. The Indus Waters fight is currently the most visible live test anywhere in the world of what happens when a state simply declines to recognise an arbitral tribunal's jurisdiction and refuses to participate - a scenario that sits at the outer edge of every enforcement lawyer's nightmare, just with a treaty instead of a commercial contract. It is also a useful teaching case on the limits of arbitration as a dispute-resolution mechanism when one party denies the tribunal's authority from the outset, a point worth remembering the next time a client asks whether an arbitration clause is “enforceable no matter what.” Attorneys advising on cross-border treaty-adjacent disputes, or simply looking for a hook to discuss enforcement risk with clients, have a live, unfolding example to point to. The next inflection point is the World Bank-appointed expert's decision, not expected for close to a year - a natural moment to revisit the story rather than repeat it prematurely.
GHAC Arbitration Week surfaces a genuine doctrinal split
If the Indus Waters story was the week's most dramatic news, the more consequential story for domestic arbitration practice unfolded quietly at GIFT City. The Gujarat High Court Arbitration Centre (GHAC) hosted its first Arbitration Week from 3 to 6 September, styled “Three Days, Three Stakeholders, One Vision,” and it delivered on its billing. The inaugural ceremony drew Gujarat's Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel, Deputy CM Harsh Sanghavi, and four sitting Supreme Court judges - a level of political and judicial star power rarely seen at an institutional-arbitration event in India, and a clear signal of how seriously the state is investing in GIFT City's arbitration ambitions.
The substance, though, is what attorneys should actually remember. At the closing sessions, Justice R.F. Nariman renewed a long-standing argument: India's arbitration regime, he said, suffers from real “uncertainty and inconsistency,” and the fix is a full-fledged first appeal on facts and law against domestic arbitral awards - effectively treating an award more like a trial-court judgment than a final, largely unreviewable determination. Justice R.V. Raveendran, appearing on the same platform, pushed back in unusually direct terms, calling the proposal contrary to the entire purpose of choosing arbitration in the first place. If parties wanted full appellate review on the merits, the argument goes, they would litigate.
This is not an abstract academic disagreement. It goes directly to the heart of the pending Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024, which remains at the consultation-draft stage and has not yet been introduced in Parliament as of this week. The Nariman–Raveendran exchange effectively previews the fault line that any future amendment will have to cross: finality versus correctability. Firms advising on long-term dispute-resolution strategy, or drafting arbitration clauses for high-value Indian contracts, should treat this as the debate to watch - not because a change is imminent, but because it signals where influential voices within India's arbitration establishment are pulling in opposite directions.
The same week produced two quieter but genuinely useful institutional developments. On 2 September, at Singapore Convention Week, Malaysia's Asian International Arbitration Centre (AIAC) and Hyderabad's International Arbitration and Mediation Centre (IAMC) signed a memorandum of understanding covering cross-empanelment of arbitrators, shared use of hearing facilities in Kuala Lumpur and Hyderabad at preferential rates, and joint training programmes. For Indian counsel running cross-border Asian disputes, this quietly expands the venue options available at a lower cost - a small but concrete step in Hyderabad's push to be taken seriously alongside Mumbai and GIFT City. And running in parallel across three cities from 7 to 11 September, the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration's sixth India ADR Week brought together more than twenty sessions on institutional arbitration, mediation, and cross-border dispute trends, closing with a keynote from Chief Justice of India Surya Kant in Delhi. Two institutional-arbitration weeks running back-to-back, in the same fortnight, is itself a data point about how crowded - and how competitive - India's arbitration-hub ambitions have become.
The Supreme Court's arbitral-interest ruling draws early academic fire
Not every consequential story this week involved a headline event. Early September brought a sharp doctrinal critique into circulation of the Supreme Court's decision in Union of India v. Larsen & Toubro Limited (2026 INSC 203), a ruling on arbitral interest arising from a 40-month railway delay dispute. The Court had set aside certain pre-award interest heads and reduced post-award interest from 12% to 8%. The emerging critique argues that the Court conflated “interest” - which contracts can validly bar - with “compensation for admitted, unpaid sums,” a distinction the Supreme Court itself drew decades ago in Secretary, Irrigation Department, Government of Orissa v. G.C. Roy.
The practical stakes are significant for anyone drafting or arbitrating infrastructure and construction contracts. If tribunals increasingly dress delay compensation as “damages” specifically to route around contractual interest bars, and if the Supreme Court's reasoning in Larsen & Toubro narrows that workaround, then contractors and government counterparties alike need to revisit both how they plead these claims and how they draft interest and compensation clauses going forward. This is exactly the kind of story that starts as a one-paragraph news item and deserves to become a full Analysis piece - the doctrinal groundwork has already been laid by the academic commentary, and the audience (infrastructure and construction counsel) is a core one for Exlitem India.
The week's court rulings: enforcement, interim relief, and forensic audits
The most recent stretch of this news cycle - rulings handed down between 29 August and 4 September but only surfacing in trade coverage this week - produced the densest cluster of judgments to track. Taken together, they touch nearly every stage of the arbitration lifecycle: constitution of the tribunal, interim relief, enforcement, and post-award asset recovery.
The most significant, by financial and reputational stakes, is the Delhi High Court's order in the long-running Daiichi Sankyo v. Malvinder Mohan Singh enforcement saga. On 31 August, Justice Subramonium Prasad directed a comprehensive forensic audit into the alleged dissipation of Fortis Healthcare shares involving former promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, their downstream entities, and seventeen banks and financial institutions. The forensic auditor, S. Ramanand Aiyar & Co., has been tasked with reconstructing the entire chain of transactions in the shares and identifying whether court orders were evaded to frustrate enforcement of Daiichi Sankyo's ₹2,562-crore foreign arbitral award. The Court's language was pointed: the audit, it said, would “pin point the exact manner by which this Court was deceived” and identify those who aided in evading its orders. For a portal built around forensic investigation and asset tracing as a core content pillar, this is close to a perfect case study - a foreign arbitral award, years of enforcement resistance, and now a court-ordered forensic reconstruction of exactly the kind of asset-dissipation scheme that forensic accountants are trained to unwind.
Almost as significant for arbitration practice generally is the Supreme Court's decision, on 1 September, to examine a genuinely unsettled question: can an arbitral tribunal, acting under Section 17 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, order a party to pay disputed sums outright, or is its power limited to preserving the subject matter of the dispute through injunctions? The question arose in Larsen & Toubro Limited v. India International Convention and Exhibition Centre Limited, where a Delhi High Court judgment had set aside a tribunal's direction requiring IICEC to release roughly ₹227 crore to L&T. A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe issued notice, describing the issue as a “larger issue” for arbitration practice - a signal that the eventual ruling is likely to be treated as a landmark statement on the scope of interim relief, well beyond the facts of this particular contract dispute. Any counsel currently seeking or defending against Section 17 relief involving disputed monetary claims should be tracking this case closely; the outcome will either expand or sharply narrow what interim relief can achieve in Indian-seated arbitrations.
Construction and infrastructure disputes featured heavily elsewhere in the docket. The Delhi High Court split down the middle in Jindal ITF Limited v. NTPC Limited, a dispute over an arbitral award worth approximately ₹1,889 crore arising from delays and shortfalls in a contract to transport imported coal to NTPC's Farakka Thermal Power Plant. Justice C. Hari Shankar would have upheld the award - covering project delays, guaranteed coal-supply shortfalls, and termination damages - while Justice Om Prakash Shukla agreed with the Single Judge's decision to set it aside on those same claims. The disagreement is now headed to a third judge or a larger bench. Splits of this kind are relatively rare at the Division Bench stage in commercial appeals and are worth watching for what the eventual resolution says about how much latitude appellate courts have when reviewing an arbitrator's findings on delay and termination.
Two further Delhi High Court rulings will matter more for day-to-day practice than for their news value. In Otsuka Chemical (India) v. Trans Engineers India, a Division Bench restored a “NIL” arbitral award - rejecting a ₹28.37 crore claim for extra work on a turnkey chemical-plant project in Rajasthan - after finding that the Single Judge had exceeded the limited scope of review available under Section 34 by effectively substituting the arbitrator's contractual interpretation with one the court considered more appropriate. The judgment is a clean, quotable restatement of a principle that gets litigated constantly: a Section 34 court's job is to check for the specific, narrow grounds the statute allows, not to re-decide the merits. And in URC Construction v. Airports Authority of India, the same court laid down detailed registry guidelines on stamp duty and registration compliance for enforcing domestic arbitral awards, holding that an insufficiently stamped award must be impounded under Section 33 and cannot be cured simply by depositing the deficient duty after the fact, without following the statutory penalty procedure. This is precisely the kind of procedural trap that catches decree-holders who assume enforcement is a formality once an award is in hand - worth a dedicated explainer for anyone filing enforcement petitions.
Real estate and consumer-facing arbitration also got a useful clarification. In Omaxe Ltd. v. Asha Saini, a Division Bench upheld arbitral awards of 15% per annum compensation for delayed possession of two flats, rejecting the developer's argument that a homebuyer who chooses arbitration forfeits remedies otherwise available under RERA or the Consumer Protection Act. The Court grounded the substantive right to compensation in Section 55 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, treating RERA and consumer forums as additional avenues rather than exclusive ones. Given how often real-estate arbitration clauses are challenged on exactly this overlap-of-remedies argument, this ruling is likely to be cited often.
Elsewhere, the Supreme Court brought a measure of clarity to enforcement sequencing in the long-running Adani–UPRVUNL coal dispute, confirming that Adani Enterprises' award against Uttar Pradesh Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited must first be satisfied out of UCM Coal Company Limited's assets, with execution against other UPRVUNL-linked entities available only if a shortfall remains - upholding the Allahabad High Court's reasoning while sharpening the order of operations. The Madras High Court, meanwhile, added to a growing and increasingly confident line of Indian rulings on arbitrability, holding in Eros Technologies Digital FZE v. Ayngaran International Media that copyright infringement disputes can be resolved through arbitration where the parties have agreed to it, and that the civil remedy available under Section 55 of the Copyright Act does not oust that agreement. And the Delhi High Court, in Hanson Agro Limited v. GAIL (India) Limited, confirmed a point that matters for any arbitration that straddles the 2015 amendments: the amended rules on arbitrator eligibility do not apply retrospectively to a proceeding that commenced before 23 October 2015, merely because the challenge to the award happens to be filed later.
A handful of narrower procedural rulings rounded out the week - the Calcutta High Court holding that a civil suit cannot remain pending once parties are referred to arbitration under Section 8; the Kerala High Court ruling that an executing court cannot refuse to enforce an award on unilateral-appointment grounds where the arbitrator was in fact mutually nominated; the Karnataka High Court permitting a villa buyer to introduce RTI records in a fraud-based challenge to an award, while stressing that additional evidence is admissible only in rare, exceptional cases; and the Jammu & Kashmir High Court confirming that an arbitrator can award price escalation for employer-caused delay even absent a contractual escalation clause. None of these is individually a headline, but together they are a useful barometer of how consistently India's High Courts are narrowing the grounds for interfering with arbitral awards — a theme worth a standalone “week in the High Courts” piece rather than five separate short articles.
Forensic and institutional watch points
Two slower-moving stories from the forensic and regulatory side remain worth tracking rather than reporting on again this week. The National Company Law Tribunal's Indore bench ruling - that a mere divergence between a forensic auditor's interim and final reports does not, by itself, establish that the final report is unreliable - continues to be a useful precedent for practitioners defending forensic-audit findings in insolvency proceedings, even though the underlying order is now several weeks old. And SEBI's enforcement machinery remains active in the background: its forensic audit into Rajesh Exports' roughly ₹15.15 lakh crore of reported overseas revenue between FY21 and FY25 has produced no fresh development this week but remains one of the largest live forensic-accounting stories in Indian markets, alongside continuing coverage of SEBI's final order against Trafiksol ITS Technologies over inflated pre-IPO revenue.
On the institutional-reform side, two gaps are worth flagging precisely because nothing has changed. The Mediation Council of India, more than two years after the Mediation Act, 2023 received partial commencement, still has not been constituted - a Lok Sabha answer on 13 February 2026 confirmed no appointments had been made. And the Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 remains exactly where it was at the start of the year: a consultation draft that has not been introduced in either House of Parliament. Both are the kind of structural, slow-moving stories that are easy to lose track of amid a busy week of judgments, but they are also exactly the stories that will eventually produce a “finally” headline - worth a periodic check-in rather than a weekly one.
Takeaway
The week's throughline is that India's institutional-arbitration ambitions and its day-to-day arbitration jurisprudence are advancing on separate but connected tracks. GIFT City, GHAC, IAMC Hyderabad and MCIA are all visibly competing for status as India's preferred arbitration venue, while the Supreme Court and High Courts are quietly, consistently narrowing the grounds on which awards can be second-guessed - from the limited scope of Section 34 review in Otsuka Chemical, to the enforcement-sequencing clarity in Adani–UPRVUNL, to the expanding list of subject matters (now including copyright) that Indian courts treat as arbitrable. The one open question that cuts against this trend of finality - the Nariman–Raveendran disagreement over merits-based appeals - is exactly the debate to watch as the 2024 Amendment Bill eventually moves toward Parliament.
For attorneys advising clients this week, three items deserve immediate attention: the Section 17 interim-relief reference now pending before the Supreme Court, which will affect every ongoing dispute where a party is seeking payment (not just preservation) through interim relief; the Delhi High Court's stamp-duty guidelines in URC Construction, which should prompt an immediate compliance check on any award currently being readied for enforcement; and the Daiichi Sankyo forensic-audit order, which is likely to generate further rulings on asset tracing and enforcement evasion over the coming months.
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