I Think Apps Pvt. Ltd., which runs the "Sarkari Result" website tracking government job results and admit cards, sued Anugya Gupta and another defendant before the Commercial Court at Varanasi over the use of a deceptively similar mark. The suit sought an injunction and damages. On 23 March 2026 the defendants moved an application under Order VII Rules 10 and 11 of the Code of Civil Procedure, asking the court to either return the plaint for presentation elsewhere or reject it outright. Their case was simple: the plaint did not state a specified value meeting the three-lakh-rupee threshold fixed under Section 2(1)(i) of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, so the Commercial Court had no business trying the suit at all.
Rather than meet that objection head-on, I Think Apps went the other way. On 9 August 2026 it filed an application under Order VI Rule 17 CPC asking to amend the plaint and peg the suit's value at five lakh rupees, comfortably clearing the commercial-suit threshold. The defendants' jurisdiction application and the plaintiff's amendment application were thus both pending on the same file, and the obvious question was which one the court should take up first. The Commercial Court settled that sequencing itself: on 13 August 2026 it directed that the jurisdiction objection under Order VII be heard and decided before the amendment application was even considered.
I Think Apps was unhappy at being made to clear the jurisdiction hurdle first and filed a petition under Article 227 of the Constitution before the Allahabad High Court, asking it to set aside that sequencing order. Its argument, in substance, was that the amendment should be taken up first, since fixing a higher suit value would itself answer the jurisdiction objection and make the whole dispute academic. Justice Rohit Ranjan Agarwal was not persuaded, and dismissed the petition, upholding the Commercial Court's order directing that the jurisdiction question be decided ahead of the amendment application.
The reasoning rests on a fairly basic proposition about courts and their own authority. A court that lacks subject-matter jurisdiction over a suit cannot use its own process to manufacture that jurisdiction for itself; any order it passes while so incompetent, including an order allowing an amendment, would be a nullity. If the Commercial Court first allowed the amendment and only later found that it never had jurisdiction to begin with, the amendment order itself would fall along with everything else built on it. The court held that an amendment aimed at rectifying the very facts that go to the root of jurisdiction cannot be treated as the ordinary curing of a defect in pleading; it is instead an attempt to create jurisdiction retrospectively, something Order VI Rule 17 was never meant to permit.
Plaintiffs in commercial suits have an obvious incentive to understate the value of their claim when that keeps the matter out of a forum they would rather avoid, and an equally obvious incentive to revise that value upward once the forum turns out to suit them better after all. This ruling closes off a convenient route for doing the second of those things after a defendant has already pointed to the shortfall: a jurisdiction objection raised under Order VII cannot be outflanked by a later amendment application, because the amendment itself now has to wait its turn. For the "Sarkari Result" litigation, the immediate effect is that the Commercial Court at Varanasi must first rule on whether it had the power to entertain the suit as originally valued, before it looks at the proposed revision at all.
The judgment gives Commercial Courts across Uttar Pradesh a clear sequencing rule to fall back on whenever a defendant's jurisdiction objection and a plaintiff's amendment application land on the file together, which happens often enough in trademark and contract disputes where the claimed value is contested. It leaves open what becomes of the suit itself once the jurisdiction objection is actually decided: whether the plaint gets returned for presentation before an ordinary civil court, or rejected outright, will depend on findings the Commercial Court is yet to record. For litigants watching the valuation of their own commercial claims, the lesson is to get the figure right before filing, since a correction offered only after a jurisdiction challenge may not be heard until that challenge is out of the way.