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Article summary

Arbitration analysis: While the Indian Arbitration & Conciliation Act 1996 (Act) does not expressly sanctify modification of awards by a court, over the years, there have been conflicting rulings of various courts on their power to modify an arbitral award. This resulted in the issue being referred to a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Gayatri Balasamy v ISG Novasoft Technologies Ltd. The majority judgment held that notwithstanding this silence in the Act, courts did have a limited power (under Sections 34 and 37 of the Act) to modify an award (in certain limited circumstances) to correct any clerical, computational, typographical errors as well as other manifest errors (provided that such modification did not necessitate a merits-based evaluation), and also to modify post-award interest if justified. Critically, the Supreme Court’s power under Article 142 of the Indian Constitution ‘for doing complete justice’ was expressly recognised in...