DMRC v. DAMEPL: a curative petition unwinds a patently illegal award

On 10 April 2024, a three-judge bench allowed DMRC's curative petition and set aside an arbitral award that, with interest, had swelled to about ₹8,000 crore, holding that the Court's earlier interference had restored a patently illegal award and caused a miscarriage of justice.

Valkya Editorial· Legal Intelligence·14 June 2026·8 min read

Court: Supreme Court of India
Citation: 2024 INSC 292
Bench: D.Y. Chandrachud, CJI, B.R. Gavai, J., Surya Kant, J.
Decided: 10 April 2024

Provisions discussed

Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996 s.34Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996 s.37Constitution of India art.137Constitution of India art.142

The facts in brief

The dispute arose out of the Delhi Airport Metro Express line — the high-speed link between New Delhi railway station and the airport, built and operated under a public-private concession. Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) was the public concessioning authority. Delhi Airport Metro Express Pvt. Ltd. (DAMEPL), a special-purpose vehicle led by Reliance Infrastructure, was the concessionaire responsible for the line's operation and maintenance.

DAMEPL terminated the concession agreement, alleging that defects in the civil structure built by DMRC made safe operation impossible and that DMRC had failed to cure those defects within the contractual cure period. DMRC contested the termination. The matter went to arbitration, and the tribunal — in a unanimous award of 2017 — upheld DAMEPL's termination, awarding it a termination payment of ₹2,782.33 crore plus interest (together with smaller heads for operating expenses and the refund of a bank guarantee). As interest accrued over the years, the total liability swelled to about ₹8,000 crore — ₹8,009.38 crore as on 14 February 2022, of which DMRC had paid roughly ₹2,599 crore with some ₹5,088 crore still outstanding when the curative petition was decided.

The award then travelled the full course of Section 34 and Section 37 review. A single judge of the Delhi High Court declined to set it aside. On appeal under Section 37, a Division Bench of the High Court set the award aside, holding that the tribunal had ignored vital evidence and reached a perverse conclusion on the cure question. DAMEPL took that reversal to the Supreme Court. In 2021, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court allowed DAMEPL's appeal and restored the award, holding that the Division Bench had exceeded the limited scope of interference permitted under the Act.

DMRC sought review of the 2021 order; review was dismissed. It then filed a curative petition — the last resort recognised by the Constitution Bench in Rupa Ashok Hurra. The curative petition came before a three-judge bench of Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justices B.R. Gavai and Surya Kant, which delivered judgment on 10 April 2024.

The curative jurisdiction

Rupa Ashok Hurra v. Ashok Hurra (2002) recognised that even after a review petition is dismissed, the Supreme Court retains an inherent power to reconsider a final judgment in the rarest of cases, to prevent abuse of its process and to cure a gross miscarriage of justice. The grounds are deliberately narrow: a violation of natural justice such that the affected party was not heard, or apprehension of bias, or a situation where the Court's own order works a manifest injustice. The procedure is constrained by safeguards — certification by a senior advocate that the Rupa Ashok Hurra grounds are met, and circulation to the judges who passed the order under challenge.

The animating concern of Rupa Ashok Hurra is finality. A litigant cannot be permitted to reopen settled matters endlessly. Curative jurisdiction is therefore not a further appeal; it is a residual constitutional safety valve, to be used only where the alternative is to let a grave injustice stand because the ordinary remedies have been exhausted.

The question in DMRC v. DAMEPL was whether the curative window could be opened not because of any procedural unfairness in the 2021 hearing, but because the outcome of that hearing — the restoration of the award — was itself a perpetuation of an illegality that the High Court had correctly identified and corrected.

What the Court held

The Court allowed DMRC's curative petition and set aside both its own 2021 order restoring the award and the underlying arbitral award. The reasoning was direct: by reversing the Division Bench, the Court in 2021 had restored an award that was patently illegal, and in doing so had caused a grave miscarriage of justice that the curative jurisdiction existed to correct.

The interference by this Court has resulted in restoring a patently illegal award. This has caused a grave miscarriage of justice.

— D.Y. Chandrachud, CJI

On the merits of the award, the Court agreed with the Division Bench's diagnosis of patent illegality. The tribunal had overlooked vital material — including the parties' joint applications to the Commissioner of Metro Railway Safety and the safety certification that allowed operations to resume — and had failed to engage with the specific contractual termination clauses. Most consequentially, the tribunal had conflated two distinct contractual concepts: curing the defects, and taking effective steps to cure the defects within the cure period. The agreement turned on whether DMRC had taken effective steps; the tribunal effectively required complete cure. That conflation, on evidence the tribunal had ignored, produced a conclusion that no reasonable body of persons could have reached — the touchstone of patent illegality.

The Court was careful to ring-fence the remedy. Curative jurisdiction may be invoked where the Court has acted beyond its jurisdiction so as to produce a grave miscarriage of justice — but it must remain exceptional. It cannot be allowed to become a routine further stage of intervention, lest the finality that the entire scheme of arbitration and of the Court's own process is designed to protect be eroded.

The doctrinal tension

The decision drew immediate and sustained commentary, because it sits at the intersection of two values that pull in opposite directions: the finality of arbitral awards, which the 1996 Act is designed to secure, and the Court's residual power to prevent injustice.

The award had survived a single judge under Section 34. It had been set aside on appeal under Section 37, restored by the Supreme Court, and survived review. By the time the curative petition was decided, the award had run the full gauntlet and been affirmed at the apex. To unmake it through the curative window is, critics observed, to use the rarest remedy not to cure a procedural defect peculiar to curative jurisdiction — there was no allegation that DMRC went unheard in 2021 — but to substitute a different view of the merits. Some commentators framed the objection as a cure administered where the Rupa Ashok Hurra disease (a violation of natural justice) was absent.

The Court's answer was that the restoration of a patently illegal award is itself the miscarriage of justice that engages the curative jurisdiction. On that view, the vice is not confined to how the 2021 hearing was conducted; it lies in the result, which left standing an award that the Court now accepts was perverse. Whether that reading expands the curative gateway beyond its intended scope is the question that practitioners and academics continue to debate. What is not in doubt is that the decision is now the leading authority cited whenever a party seeks — or resists — curative relief against an award the Supreme Court has previously affirmed.

The unease has a practical edge as well as a doctrinal one. India has spent two decades persuading commercial parties that an arbitral award, once rendered and run through the limited curial review the 1996 Act permits, is final and enforceable. A remedy that can reach an award even after the Supreme Court has restored it introduces a tail of uncertainty that sophisticated parties price. The Court was alive to this, which is why it framed the remedy so restrictively — emphasising that it is exceptional, available only where the Court's own order has perpetuated a grave miscarriage of justice, and not a routine further tier. The decision's authority therefore depends as much on the narrowness of its gateway as on the breadth of its result: it is a precedent for unwinding an affirmed award only in the rarest case, not a general invitation to relitigate.

Why the decision matters

DMRC v. DAMEPL is the single largest arbitral-award reversal in Indian legal history and the most consequential curative-jurisdiction ruling since Rupa Ashok Hurra itself. It re-opened the debate about the finality of arbitral awards at the very moment Indian arbitration was working to project an image of minimal curial interference and predictable enforcement.

For award-debtors, the decision is a reminder that even an award the Supreme Court has restored is not beyond reach if it is genuinely patently illegal — though the path runs through the narrow and heavily guarded curative gateway, not the ordinary appellate process. For award-creditors and for the arbitration ecosystem, it is a caution that the architecture of finality is not absolute, and that a tribunal's failure to engage with vital evidence and the precise contractual standard can render an award vulnerable years after it appeared secure.

The case also sharpens the content of "patent illegality" under Section 34: an award that ignores material evidence, misreads the operative contractual test, and reaches a conclusion no reasonable body of persons could reach is not a permissible plausible view immune from review — it is a perversity that the courts may correct, even, in the rarest case, through the curative window.