Home Care Retail Marts v. Haresh N. Sanghavi: Section 9 interim relief is available to the unsuccessful party at the post-award stage

The architecture of Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996 has, since the section's enactment, contemplated three temporal windows — before commencement of arbitral proceedings, during the proceedings, and after the award but before its enforcement under Section 36. The third window has, historically, produced the most contested practitioner question: who can invoke Section 9 once the award has been made? A pro-award reading — that only the successful party can seek interim measures, to preserve "the fruits of the award" pending enforcement — had developed in some High Courts. A textual reading — that the section's reference to "any party to an arbitration agreement" admits of no such restriction — had developed in others. The Supreme Court's 24 April 2026 decision in Home Care Retail Marts Pvt. Ltd. v. Haresh N. Sanghavi, reported as 2026 INSC 415, has resolved the conflict in favour of the textual reading.

The ruling sits alongside Bhupesh Bhayana v. Kunal Seth, 2026 INSC 546, as the two emerging templates for post-award practitioner architecture in 2026 — Home Care Retail Marts on Section 9 access for the award-debtor, Bhupesh Bhayana on the first substantial application of the Gayatri Balasamy limited-modification corridor under Section 34. The two rulings, read together, expand the operational toolkit available to the award-debtor in the post-award window between the making of the award and its enforcement.

The factual matrix

The underlying matter concerned a commercial dispute between Home Care Retail Marts Pvt. Ltd. and Haresh N. Sanghavi that had been referred to arbitration. The arbitral tribunal had passed an award against the appellant. The appellant — the unsuccessful party at the tribunal — filed a Section 34 challenge to the award and, alongside that challenge, an application under Section 9 of the 1996 Act seeking interim measures to preserve the subject-matter of the dispute pending the disposal of the Section 34 proceedings.

The maintainability of the Section 9 application was challenged at the threshold on two grounds. First, that Section 9 was, on a settled line of High Court authority, available only to the successful party at the post-award stage — and that an unsuccessful party who had been ordered to perform under the award could not turn around and seek interim measures against the successful party. Second, that the "fruits of the award" doctrine — drawn from a body of pro-award High Court reasoning — confined Section 9's post-award reach to measures preserving the award's enforceability.

The matter reached the Supreme Court on appeal, and the Bench was asked to resolve the doctrinal question directly: does Section 9 — at the post-award, pre-enforcement stage — admit of an application by the unsuccessful party?

The doctrinal context: a long-running High Court conflict

Before Home Care Retail Marts, the High Courts had taken divergent positions on the question.

The Bombay High Court line had, in a series of orders, restricted Section 9 at the post-award stage to the award-creditor — on the reasoning that the section's role in the architecture was to preserve "the fruits of the award" and that an award-debtor with a Section 34 challenge had no fruits to preserve. The Delhi High Court line had, in contrast, read the section's text more liberally — recognising that the section refers to "any party to an arbitration agreement" without textual qualification and that interim measures preserving subject-matter pending Section 34 are not foreclosed by the section's structure. The Madras High Court had moved between the two positions in different orders, producing a body of jurisprudence in which the outcome of a Section 9 application turned in part on the forum.

The divergence had — by early 2026 — produced a forum-shopping question: an unsuccessful party with a Section 34 challenge would seek the most receptive Section 9 forum, and a successful party would resist on the basis of the most restrictive doctrine. The Supreme Court's intervention was, by mid-2026, overdue.

The reasoning

The Court's reasoning operates on three connected threads.

The textual reading of Section 9

The first and foundational thread is textual. Section 9 of the 1996 Act provides — in its opening sub-section — that "a party may, before or during arbitral proceedings or at any time after the making of the arbitral award but before it is enforced in accordance with Section 36, apply to a court" for the specified interim measures. The subsequent reference to the applicant is in unrestricted terms: the section refers to "a party to an arbitration agreement", and that phrase admits of no distinction between successful and unsuccessful parties at the post-award stage.

The Court's reading is that the textual reference to "any party" is determinative. The drafting did not graft on a "successful party" qualifier. Such a qualifier cannot be read in by judicial construction, particularly where the consequence would be to deny one party — at a stage when the Section 34 challenge is pending and the award has not yet been enforced — access to the interim-measures architecture that the section was designed to provide. The textual reading is, additionally, consistent with the Model Law architecture that Section 9 implements.

The rejection of the "fruits of the award" restriction

The second thread is the explicit rejection of the "fruits of the award" doctrine as a confining principle. The doctrine had grown up in a body of pro-award High Court reasoning that read Section 9 at the post-award stage as a mechanism for protecting the award-holder's eventual recovery. The doctrine had a plausible footing in the section's structural placement between the making of the award and its enforcement under Section 36 — but it could not, on the Court's reading, override the section's explicit textual reach.

The Court's reading is that protecting the fruits of the award is one purpose that Section 9 serves at the post-award stage, but it is not the section's only purpose. The section is, at root, an interim-measures provision; the interim measures may be sought by either party for any legitimate purpose recognised in the section's enumerated heads — including preservation of subject-matter, securing of the amount in dispute, appointment of receivers and other protective relief. The reduction of the section to a successful-party tool would amputate the section's broader interim-measures function.

The "care, caution and circumspection" threshold

The third thread is the procedural and substantive discipline that the Court has imposed on the use of Section 9 by the unsuccessful party. The Court has emphasised that the jurisdiction is to be exercised — in the unsuccessful-party context — with "care, caution and circumspection". The phrase is not idle: it operates as a higher threshold than the ordinary balance-of-convenience and prima facie case standards that govern Section 9 applications generally.

The "care, caution and circumspection" discipline is the Court's response to the foreseeable misuse concern — that an award-debtor with a weak Section 34 challenge will routinely invoke Section 9 to delay or harass the award-holder. The threshold requires the Section 9 court to satisfy itself, in the unsuccessful-party context, that the relief sought is genuinely necessary to preserve the subject-matter, that the Section 34 challenge has at least a prima facie tenability, and that the interim measure does not amount to a stay of the award in disguise.

The plain language of Section 9 — "any party to an arbitration agreement" — does not confine the section to the successful party at the post-award stage. Such jurisdiction must, however, be exercised with care, caution and circumspection.

The reach of the rule

Three boundary observations help fix the rule's operational reach.

The rule does not displace the no-automatic-stay regime. Hindustan Construction Company v. Union of India — which struck down Section 87 and confirmed that there is no automatic stay on enforcement merely upon the filing of a Section 34 challenge — remains controlling on the question of stay. A Section 9 application by the unsuccessful party is not a substitute for an application for stay of the award under Section 36(3); the two are doctrinally distinct. The Section 9 application seeks interim measures to preserve subject-matter; the Section 36(3) stay application seeks suspension of enforcement.

The rule does not authorise a merits review at the Section 9 stage. The "care, caution and circumspection" threshold requires the Section 9 court to consider the prima facie tenability of the Section 34 challenge, but that is not a substantive review on the Section 34 grounds. The court does not, at the Section 9 stage, decide whether the award is liable to be set aside; it considers only whether the challenge crosses the prima facie threshold sufficient to warrant interim protection.

The rule applies only at the post-award, pre-enforcement window. The Section 9 window closes on enforcement of the award under Section 36. Once the award is enforced, the post-enforcement remedy of the unsuccessful party is execution-stage relief under the relevant procedural code, not a Section 9 application. The temporal architecture of Section 9 — pre-arbitration, during arbitration, post-award pre-enforcement — is preserved.

What the practitioner does with this

Three operational guides emerge.

For award-debtor's counsel. The post-award architecture now includes Section 9 alongside Section 34 and Section 36(3). A Section 9 application, framed within the "care, caution and circumspection" threshold, is a legitimate route to preserving subject-matter pending the Section 34 challenge. The pleading discipline is to identify, with specificity, the subject-matter that requires preservation, the nexus between the interim measure and the Section 34 grounds, and the risk that — absent the interim measure — the Section 34 remedy would be rendered nugatory by intervening conduct.

For award-creditor's counsel. The resistance to the unsuccessful party's Section 9 application now operates on the "care, caution and circumspection" threshold rather than on a maintainability bar. The resistance should focus on (i) the absence of genuine subject-matter requiring preservation; (ii) the absence of prima facie tenability in the underlying Section 34 challenge; (iii) the disguised-stay character of the relief sought, where the interim measure would effectively suspend enforcement of the award; and (iv) the conduct of the award-debtor as bearing on the balance of convenience.

For Section 9 Bench. The discipline post-Home Care Retail Marts is to apply the elevated threshold consciously in unsuccessful-party applications. The reasoning should record (i) that the elevated threshold applies; (ii) the considerations that satisfy or fail the threshold; and (iii) the precise interim relief and its temporal scope, narrowly tailored to the preservation purpose. The Section 9 order should not — on the Home Care Retail Marts discipline — drift into a de facto stay of the award.

The doctrinal contribution

The doctrinal contribution of Home Care Retail Marts is threefold.

First, it recalibrates the architecture of post-award protection. Until 24 April 2026, the architecture had been understood — across a substantial body of High Court authority — to favour the award-creditor at the post-award Section 9 stage. The ruling restores symmetry: both parties have textual access to Section 9 during the post-award, pre-enforcement window, with the unsuccessful party operating under the higher "care, caution and circumspection" threshold.

Second, it confirms the primacy of textual fidelity in Section 9 construction. The "fruits of the award" doctrine — a judicial construct that had read a successful-party qualifier into the section — could not survive a textually disciplined reading. The Court's preference for the explicit language over the doctrinal gloss is consistent with the textual discipline that the Constitution Bench in In Re Interplay between Arbitration Agreements under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 and the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 had applied to Section 11 in December 2023.

Third, it produces an operational toolkit for the award-debtor that, paired with Bhupesh Bhayana on Section 34 limited modification, substantially expands the post-award practitioner architecture in 2026. The award-debtor now has three connected post-award doctrinal tools: a Section 34 challenge with the four Gayatri Balasamy corridors available for limited modification; a Section 36(3) application for stay of enforcement; and a Section 9 application — at the elevated threshold — for subject-matter preservation.

The doctrinal arc

The ruling sits within the broader 2023–2026 arc of Supreme Court arbitration jurisprudence that has, on a textual-discipline approach, re-read provisions of the 1996 Act in pro-arbitration terms. The In Re Interplay 7-judge ruling on stamping in December 2023, the Gayatri Balasamy 5-judge ruling on Section 34 limited modification in April 2025, the Cox & Kings 5-judge ruling on the group-of-companies doctrine in December 2023, and the Home Care Retail Marts ruling on Section 9 in April 2026 share a common methodology: textual reading of the provision, rejection of doctrinal glosses that had narrowed the provision's reach, and a discipline of locating jurisdictional gateways in the explicit statutory language rather than in judicial construction.

The Section 9 question now joins the stamping question, the Section 34 modification question, the group-of-companies question, and the Section 11 jurisdictional question as the principal post-2023 doctrinal arcs that have been resolved on a textual-fidelity basis.

What it did not decide

Three questions remain open after Home Care Retail Marts.

First, the precise content of "care, caution and circumspection" — what factors the Section 9 court should weigh, what evidentiary threshold applies on the prima facie tenability of the Section 34 challenge, and how the elevated threshold interacts with the ordinary Section 9 standards — will be developed case-by-case through 2026 and beyond. The ruling supplies the framework; the doctrinal content will accrete.

Second, the interaction between a Section 9 application by the unsuccessful party and a Section 36(3) stay application is left for further refinement. The two are doctrinally distinct but operationally adjacent; courts will need to develop principles for sequencing and for avoiding inconsistent orders.

Third, the question of Section 9 interim measures against third parties — where the subject-matter to be preserved is in the hands of a non-party to the arbitration — was not engaged by the Home Care Retail Marts facts and remains open on the existing High Court line.

The bottom line

Home Care Retail Marts v. Haresh N. Sanghavi opens Section 9 — at the post-award, pre-enforcement window — to the unsuccessful party, subject to a higher "care, caution and circumspection" threshold. The ruling resolves a long-standing High Court conflict by anchoring the conclusion in Section 9's textual reach. It does not displace the no-automatic-stay regime; it does not authorise merits review at the Section 9 stage; and it does not extend Section 9's temporal reach beyond enforcement. What it does is to restore symmetry to the post-award architecture and to supply a legitimate interim-measures tool for the award-debtor with a pending Section 34 challenge. The practitioner architecture for post-award practice in India is, after 24 April 2026, materially different from what it was the day before.

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• Hindustan Construction Company v. Union of India: striking down Section 87 and the no-automatic-stay regime
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• Arbitration in May 2026: the post-Gayatri-Balasamy modification line, the stamping discipline, and the Section 9 reset