The Article 142 Blackhole: Is Gayatri Balasamy The Much-Needed Push To Finally Trigger Legislative Intervention?

This piece was originally published on the Kluwer Arbitration Blog at: https://arbitrationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2025/06/02/the-article-142-blackhole-is-gayatri-balasamy-the-much-needed-push-to-finally-trigger-legislative-intervention/

On April 30, 2025, a five judge constitutional bench (by a majority of 4:1) of the Supreme Court of India ("SC") passed the much awaited judgment in Gayatri Balasamy v. ISG Novasoft Technologies Limited ("Judgment") on the issue of whether a court, hearing a challenge to the arbitral award, can modify the award.

As discussed in our previous post, this Judgment could have potentially put an end to the controversy of whether and to what extent courts can interfere and modify an arbitral award. In this article, we discuss how the constitutional bench of the SC tackled this issue and whether it has succeeded in its mandate of putting an end to the on-going debate, as many had hoped.