Section 29A of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 sets a strict outer timeline for a tribunal to deliver its award, and an award rendered after that mandate has lapsed is, on paper, vulnerable to challenge as a nullity. The Supreme Court has now clarified an important practical wrinkle in that scheme: where a court subsequently extends the tribunal's mandate under Section 29A, an award delivered in the window between the technical expiry and the court's extension order is not automatically void.
The Court's reasoning leans on substance over form — the purpose of Section 29A's timeline is to prevent indefinite delay in arbitration, not to hand a disappointed party a procedural windfall by invalidating an otherwise sound award purely because of a sequencing gap between the tribunal's deadline and a court's later ratification of an extension. Retroactively validating the award, once the extension is granted, gives effect to what the parties and the court ultimately intended — a timely, enforceable resolution of the dispute.
The provision itself has had an eventful history since its introduction by the 2015 amendment to the Act, and its subsequent 2019 revision, which relaxed the original rigid twelve-month default timeline in favour of a more flexible framework for extension applications. That legislative evolution reflects a recurring tension the courts have had to manage: Section 29A exists to stop arbitration from drifting the way litigation historically has, but a purely mechanical application of its deadline — treating every award delivered even a day past the technical expiry as void, regardless of whether an extension was subsequently and properly granted — risks punishing parties and tribunals for essentially administrative timing gaps rather than genuine delay or misconduct.
The decision will be welcomed by parties and tribunals who have found themselves in this exact procedural bind — award delivered, mandate extension pending — since it removes a technical vulnerability that had no real bearing on the fairness or correctness of the underlying award. It does not, however, dilute the underlying discipline of Section 29A: tribunals and parties should still be applying for extensions before the mandate lapses wherever practicable, rather than relying on this ruling as a safety net. Prudent practice remains to file the Section 29A extension application well ahead of the deadline, with the award delivery date deliberately sequenced after the court's extension order wherever the tribunal's own timeline allows for it.