THE AUTHORS:
Apeksha Kachhawaha, Advocate, Delhi High Court, New Delhi
Kshitij Saruparia, Advocate, Rajasthan High Court, Jodhpur
The Indian Supreme Court’s judgment in Gujarat Water Supply and Sewerage Board v. Saryu Plastics Pvt. Ltd. (2026 INSC 552), delivered on 26 May 2026, settles a question that sat unresolved alongside the Section 29A jurisprudence: What happens when a party participates in arbitration through an expired mandate without ever objecting, and then challenges the resulting award once it goes against them? The answer is estoppel. But the more interesting part of the ruling is why, and what it reveals about the structure of Indian arbitration law after three years of mandate-related litigation.
Two Problems, Two Solutions
To understand what Gujarat Water Supply actually decides, it is necessary to distinguish it from Rohan Builders (India) Pvt. Ltd. v. Berger Paints India Ltd. (2024 SCC OnLine SC 2494) and C. Velusamy v. K. Indhera (2026 INSC 112).
Rohan Builders (September 2024) addressed a statutory mandate: The Supreme Court held that under Section 29A(4) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, courts could extend an arbitrator’s mandate even after the prescribed statutory period had expired, reading “terminate” in that provision as conditional rather than absolute. Velusamy (February 2026) extended the logic: a Section 29A(5) extension application is maintainable even after an award has been delivered beyond the statutory deadline, with an out-of-time award treated as ineffective rather than void, and the tribunal entitled to “pick up the thread” and deliver a fresh award once the court grants extension.
Gujarat Water Supply is not a further step in that sequence. The court was explicit: “In the facts of the present case, Section 29A of the Act does not apply”. The case arises from a 2012 arbitration agreement, pre-dating the 2015 amendment that introduced Section 29A. The parties’ contractual arrangement, not any statutory provision, governed how long the arbitrator could act. The mandate problem here is purely one of contract, and the court’s solution is accordingly equitable.
These are not successive steps in a single doctrinal framework but two parallel regimes addressing distinct mandate-related issues. Where the mandate is statutory under Section 29A, the remedy lies in obtaining a court-ordered extension, as recognised in Rohan Builders and Velusamy. Where the mandate is contractual, however, Gujarat Water Supply provides an alternative route: acquiescence-based estoppel, which operates without the need for a court order.
The Facts That Generated the Estoppel
The dispute involved supply contracts for PVC pipes between a state utility and a manufacturer, with the underlying commercial dispute crystallising around alleged excess payments between 1998 and 2002. After more than a decade, the parties executed an arbitration agreement in April 2012, fixing a six-month mandate for the sole arbitrator.
What followed was a prolonged and largely Board-caused delay. The parties consensually extended the mandate multiple times through to September 2014. After that, the arbitrator made three further unilateral extensions, taking proceedings through to August 2015. The Board then itself consented to one more extension, to 30 September 2015. When the arbitrator sought yet another extension to November 2015, the Board did not respond.
On 7 October, the arbitrator fixed a hearing for 15 October. The Board’s response on 14 October cited “pre-engagements” and said it could not attend. It said nothing about mandate expiry. The award was dispatched by courier on 27 October. The following day, the Board sent an email asserting that it had not extended the arbitrator’s mandate and invoking Section 14 of the Act. By that point, however, the award had already left the arbitrator’s hands.
The court found at paragraph 21 that the Board had “tacitly agreed to extension of the mandate of the Arbitrator”, had “acquiesced with the alleged invalidity”, and “cannot be allowed to turn around after the Award was passed”. It was estopped from challenging the award on mandate grounds.
The Contractual/Statutory Distinction and Its Limits
The Board attempted to deflect the estoppel argument by relying on Bharat Udyog Ltd. v. Ambernath Municipal Council (2026 SCC OnLine SC 463), where the Supreme Court had held that there can be no estoppel against a statute. The submission had force: if the mandate defect is statutory, conduct cannot cure it.
The court’s response draws a line that practitioners working with mandate issues will need to keep in mind. In Bharat Udyog, the arbitrator had acted without any valid arbitration agreement, making the defect purely statutory. In Gujarat Water Supply, the mandate was a creature of the parties’ contract, not a statutory imposition. Accordingly, the court held that “the grievance of the Board about the expiry of the mandate of the Arbitrator is a matter governed by the contract and not by the statute”, and estoppel applied.
This is not a narrow holding. It establishes that conduct-based acquiescence can defeat a challenge to an arbitrator’s mandate where the source of that mandate is contractual. The distinction between contractual and statutory mandates therefore assumes considerable doctrinal significance. In arbitrations governed by Section 29A, the statutory framework remains controlling, and the anti-estoppel principle articulated in Bharat Udyog would preclude a party from relying on acquiescence as a substitute for a court-ordered extension of time. The estoppel route recognised in Gujarat Water Supply is thus likely to be most relevant in legacy arbitrations predating the 2015 amendments, as well as in arbitrations where the parties have independently prescribed a mandate timeline outside the Section 29A regime.
The International Dimension
The result in Gujarat Water Supply will be intuitive to English arbitration lawyers even though the legal route differs. Section 73 of the Arbitration Act 1996 provides that a party who “takes part, or continues to take part” in proceedings without promptly raising an objection loses the right to challenge later, including on jurisdictional grounds. English courts have applied this without much sympathy for late objectors: In Radisson Hotels APS Danmark v. Hayat Otel [2023] EWHC 892 (Comm), the High Court rejected a challenge on the basis that the applicant had not acted “promptly” when the grounds arose. The Court of Appeal confirmed the same principle in NIOC v. Crescent Petroleum [2023] EWCA Civ 826.
The conceptual overlap with Gujarat Water Supply is clear: participation without timely objection extinguishes the right to complain. The difference is structural. England’s Section 73 is a codified statutory rule of general application, and because English law imposes no time limit on when an arbitrator must deliver an award, the precise scenario that generated Gujarat Water Supply cannot arise in a London-seated arbitration. England eliminated the problem at source by not creating statutory award deadlines in the first place.
Singapore presents a similar contrast. Under the International Arbitration Act and the UNCITRAL Model Law as adopted there, no statutory time limit governs when an award must be made. SIAC’s 2025 Rules impose soft institutional timelines for drafting and delivery, but these carry no mandate-termination consequences. The problem that generated three years of Indian Supreme Court jurisprudence on Section 29A simply does not exist in Singapore-seated arbitrations. This contrast matters for the policy question that sits behind all of this litigation. The UNCITRAL Model Law ties mandate termination to the delivery of the final award and not to elapsed time. India’s decision to layer a statutory deadline onto the Model Law framework was a deliberate response to genuine delays in domestic arbitration. That response was not unreasonable. The decade since has, however, generated a substantial body of litigation not about the merits of arbitral disputes, but about the mandate itself. Section 29A has produced a new category of meta-dispute: challenges to the arbitrator’s authority arising from the expiry of statutory timelines. Rohan Builders, Velusamy, and now Gujarat Water Supply are all products of that legislative design. In different ways, each decision reflects a judicial effort to soften the most disruptive consequences of the hard-deadline regime introduced by the 2015 amendments.
An Open Question
The Bharat Udyog distinction carries an implicit question that Gujarat Water Supply does not fully answer. The court held that estoppel cannot work against a statutory mandate defect. But what, precisely, does that mean for a party that has participated without objection through an expired Section 29A mandate, and then challenges the award? Is their only option a post-award Section 29A extension application under Velusamy? Or does the acquiescence reasoning from Gujarat Water Supply have any persuasive force in that context, even if it cannot operate as a strict estoppel?
The question is not hypothetical. Section 29A applies to domestic arbitrations. The same pattern of silent participation followed by a post-award mandate challenge will recur in post-2015 disputes. When it does, Gujarat Water Supply’s reasoning that a party who attended hearings, filed pleadings, and never once raised the mandate issue should not be permitted to use that issue as a weapon after receiving an adverse award will be available to award-holders as a persuasive argument even if the strict estoppel doctrine cannot be invoked. The court has supplied the language. How far that language travels into the statutory domain remains to be seen.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Apeksha Kachhawaha is an advocate practicing before the Delhi High Court. She graduated from Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur, in 202. Her academic and professional interests include arbitration, dispute resolution, international law, and public law. She has previously written on contemporary developments in arbitration and commercial law and remains engaged with emerging issues in dispute resolution practice.
Kshitij Saruparia is an advocate practicing before the Rajasthan High Court and a graduate of NALSAR University of Law with a focus on arbitration, commercial litigation, and constitutional law. He has represented his university at leading international mediation & negotiation competitions and multiple national moot court competitions, including the ICC International Commercial Mediation Competition in Paris, NUJS-HSF Moot Court Competition, etc. He also serves as the Editor of the NALSAR–IAMC ADR Journal and his interests lie in international arbitration, commercial law, strategic dispute resolution and constitutional law.
*The views and opinions expressed by authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect those of their organizations, employers, or Daily Jus, Jus Mundi, or Jus Connect.
