Indo Alusys Industries Limited sued Alpro Industries in 2016 to recover about Rs 35.50 lakh with interest. At the time, a commercial dispute only went to a Commercial Court if it was worth at least Rs 1 crore, so the suit was filed and tried as an ordinary civil suit. Two years later, the Commercial Courts (Amendment) Act, 2018 cut that threshold down to Rs 3 lakh, which meant a case like this one would, if filed afresh, have gone straight to a Commercial Court.
By the time the suit had dragged on to reach the evidence stage, Alpro Industries saw an opening. It applied to have the matter transferred to a Commercial Court, presumably hoping for the procedural advantages, or at least a materially different trajectory, that the specialised forum offers. The trial court refused. Section 19 of the 2018 Amendment Act confines the lower threshold to commercial disputes instituted on or after 3 May 2018, the date the amendment came into force, and this suit had been instituted in 2016.
Rather than simply accept that answer and move on, Alpro Industries challenged Section 19 itself before the Delhi High Court, arguing that drawing the line at 3 May 2018 was arbitrary and violated Article 14 of the Constitution. Two similarly placed litigants, one whose suit happened to be filed a week before the cut-off and one a week after, would be treated completely differently for no principled reason, the petitioner said, and a provision that produces that kind of accidental inequality cannot survive constitutional scrutiny.
The Division Bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia was not persuaded. Prospective legislation necessarily draws a line somewhere, and the fact that people on either side of that line are treated differently is not, by itself, a mark of unconstitutionality. If it were, the Bench reasoned, almost every amendment to procedural or substantive law that applies only going forward would be exposed to an Article 14 challenge merely because it does not reach back to redo pending matters under the new regime. That cannot be the test.
A settled line of the same High Court's own precedent backed the Bench up on this. A 2022 ruling in Satyanarain Khandelwal v. Prem Arora had already held that Section 19 is not retrospective and that its language, tying the amended specified-value regime to disputes instituted on or after 3 May 2018, leaves no real room for a different reading. A retrospective application, that earlier ruling had warned, would disturb parties' accrued procedural rights built around the forum and process applicable when they filed suit. The 2026 Bench saw no reason to depart from that view, and found nothing irrational in Parliament choosing to let pending litigation continue in the forum where it started rather than uprooting thousands of part-heard suits into Commercial Courts overnight.
Dismissal of the petition followed, and the trial court's refusal to transfer the 2016 suit stood undisturbed. For litigants who filed before May 2018 and are still waiting for judgment, the message is that there is no late entry into the Commercial Courts regime merely because their dispute would, if filed today, meet the lower threshold. The forum is fixed by the date of institution, not by when a party midway through trial decides a different court might serve them better.
The ruling closes off what had become a recurring argument before Delhi's civil courts in long-pending suits straddling the 2018 amendment, where parties facing an unfavourable trial court, an adverse interim order, or simply a slow-moving docket periodically floated a transfer application hoping for a fresh start in the specialised Commercial Division. With the Act's prospective application now reaffirmed and its constitutionality upheld, that route is closed, and pre-2018 suits will run their course to judgment in the forum where they were filed, appealable in the ordinary way rather than through the Commercial Appellate Division.