The Delhi High Court has dismissed a Section 9 Arbitration Act application by Roadway Solutions India Infra Limited seeking to restrain the National Highways Authority of India from acting on a Notice of Intention to Terminate an EPC contract for the six-laning of the Kagal-Satara section of NH-48, holding that the mere presence of a termination clause with a cure-and-representation mechanism does not, by itself, render the contract an inherently 'determinable' contract under Section 14(d) of the Specific Relief Act, 1963.
Justice Om Prakash Shukla, ruling on the interim injunction application, held that a contract does not become legally 'determinable' — and therefore outside the scope of specific performance or an injunction restraining termination — simply because it contains a clause allowing termination upon specified defaults, particularly where that clause builds in a cure period and an opportunity for the counterparty to make representations before termination takes final effect. The Court's analysis focused on whether NHAI had in fact followed that contractual cure-and-representation process, rather than treating the existence of a termination clause as automatically fatal to the contractor's claim for interim relief.
On the facts, the Court found no prima facie case for an injunction, holding that the balance of convenience favoured NHAI and that the public interest in the six-laning project continuing without interruption weighed against restraining the authority from proceeding on its termination notice. Importantly, the Court left all of the contractor's substantive contentions — including whether NHAI's grounds for termination were themselves valid — open for the arbitral tribunal to decide, confining its own ruling strictly to the narrower question of interim relief.
The ruling reflects a broader trend in how Indian courts are approaching Section 9 applications against government infrastructure contract terminations: close scrutiny of whether the contractual pre-termination process was actually followed, rather than a reflexive willingness to freeze termination merely because a dispute exists.