Photo of Anuradha Mukherjee

Partner in the Dispute Resolution Team at the Delhi office of Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas. Anuradha has extensive experience of more than 20 years in litigation and arbitration. She routinely advises domestic and international clients in strategizing and undertaking variety of civil, commercial and corporate litigations and arbitrations, and has been actively engaged in wide range of commercial and infrastructure arbitrations. Anuradha has appeared before various fora and courts including the High Court of Delhi, the Trial Courts, the Company Law Board, the Competition Commission, the Debt Recovery Tribunal, the State and National Consumer Forums and the Supreme Court of India. She can be reached at anuradha.mukherjee@cyrilshroff.com

Emergency Awards passed in Foreign-seated Arbitration - Enforceable or not

A recent award passed by an Emergency Arbitrator at the instance of Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings in relation to Reliance Retail Ventures Limited’s (RRVL) ongoing acquisition of Future Group’s retail, wholesale, logistics, and warehousing arm, has once again brought into sharp focus a gap in India’s aspirations to improve Ease of Doing Business in the country and create a conducive environment for enforcement of awards passed in foreign seated arbitrations.

Although the said Emergency Award directed Future Group to maintain status quo with regard to the transaction[1], recent news reports have confirmed that Future Group has already approached the Hon’ble Delhi High Court by way of a suit seeking to restrain Amazon from preventing the ₹24,713 crore deal from going through.[2]
Continue Reading Emergency Awards passed in Foreign-seated Arbitration: Enforceable or not ?

Patent Licensing in times of Covid-19 Pandemic

The entire world has been grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic for some time now, and efforts are on to find a treatment protocol and vaccine. Several drugs and treatment therapies are being tried and tested to find a cure for this pandemic. In the middle of this fervent R&D activity, some questions come to mind — what about IP protection? How would companies commercialise a cure — if and when it is finally found? How would the cure be available to the public en-masse at affordable prices? Enter patent law and the aspect of Licencing.
Continue Reading To Protect or Not to Protect that is the Question : Patent Licensing in times of Covid-19 Pandemic

COVID 19 - Online Courts in India

Work from home for a litigating lawyer in India currently looks like endless hours of reading, chores and on-demand video. In this blog, we argue that this will be a short-lived state of affairs. Remote working for litigation will be operationalised soon and will become the new normal for litigating lawyers in the not too distant future.

Courts are an essential service for civil society. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, courts across the country have gone into an urgent-only, online-only mode with electronic filings, email mentions and, in exceptional cases, online hearings via video conferencing/ video calling facilities. This urgent only model of restricted judicial access is not sustainable past the initial lockdown. Courts will have to resume a full-time case load in the near future, albeit in a form that will be quite different from the way as we knew it. The urgent-only format will come to pass, with courts adopting the online-only format for its regular functioning. As a first step, the Supreme Court of India issued a suo-motu order yesterday setting out guidelines for courts to function through video conferencing during the COVID 19 Pandemic.
Continue Reading From the Gavel to the Click: COVID 19 poised to be the inflection point for Online Courts in India

BCCI v. Kochi Cricket Supreme Court’s Much Needed Third Umpire Decision

The Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2015 (2015 Amendment) came into force with effect from October 23, 2015. Although this amendment was enacted to remove controversies and iron out wrinkles in the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, (Parent Act), it has in fact, given rise to its own set of controversies. One of the burning issues was the applicability of the 2015 Amendment. Section 26 of the 2015 Amendment provides for its applicability, and reads as follows:

  1. Nothing contained in this Act shall apply to the arbitral proceedings commenced, in accordance with the provisions of Section 21 of the principal Act, before the commencement of this Act unless the parties otherwise agree but this Act shall apply in relation to arbitral proceedings commenced on or after the date of commencement of this Act.

One would believe that the above provision would have settled any issue of applicability of the 2015 Amendment. It has instead given rise to more litigation,[i] which has now been partially addressed by the Supreme Court.[ii]

The controversy in all the litigation that came up before the High Courts, and which also saw conflicting points of view, was around the applicability of the amended Section 36 of the Parent Act. In the pre-amendment era, when an award debtor challenged an award under Section 34, the award creditor was prevented from enforcing the award until a determination had been made by a court on the challenge, because of an ‘automatic stay’ on the operation of the award.

In order to overcome this, and for the benefit of award creditors, Section 36 of the Parent Act, was amended to do away with this ‘automatic stay’. It required the challenging party to separately apply for a stay and also required the court to direct the award debtor to deposit the award amount, so as to avoid frivolous challenges. The question for the courts has been the applicability of the amended Section 36 to Section 34 applications that were filed before and after the 2015 Amendment came into force.Continue Reading BCCI v. Kochi Cricket: Supreme Court’s Much Needed Third Umpire Decision

Image credit: Scroll.in, September 26, 2017

This is the fifth blog piece in our series entitled “Those Were the Days”, which is published monthly. We hope you enjoy reading this as much as we have enjoyed putting this together.


India’s judiciary has been known for judicial activism with the Supreme Court often deciding to intervene, not just to strike down laws that are held to be unconstitutional, but also in governance, which many believe ought to be the exclusive domain of the executive. While opinion is divided about the desirability of judicial activism, most would agree that it is the judiciary and its fearless will to intervene and deliver justice, even at the risk of stepping into the domain of the legislature or the executive, which has preserved democratic process over the years.

Unfortunately, rampant judicial activism has given rise to an inevitable debate about the balance of powers between the “three pillars of democracy” and then, as a corollary, the question of the manner in which Judges are appointed in the first place. The prevalent “Collegium System” has been severely criticised, as being non-transparent and prone to nepotism, with several jurists and respected members of the bar themselves pointing out that in no other large democracy does an institution so powerful, choose its own members. The time is therefore right to look closely at the history of how the “Collegium System” evolved, through what is known as the Three Judges Cases.Continue Reading Should the Judges Cases be Revisited?