Abhoy Charan Bakshi held a road maintenance contract with the National Highways Authority of India worth Rs 4.37 crore, covering the Baharampore to Farakka stretch of National Highway 34 in West Bengal. Maintenance contracts of this kind fix a lump sum for keeping a defined stretch in running condition over a set period, leaving the contractor to absorb ordinary wear and the cost of routine defects while reserving separate payment only for work genuinely outside that scope. A dispute arose over repair work Bakshi said he had carried out beyond what the contract required, and the matter went before a three-member arbitral tribunal.
On 30 November 2022 the tribunal delivered a split verdict. The majority rejected every claim Bakshi raised, producing a nil award in NHAI's favour, while the dissenting member took the opposite view and would have awarded him Rs 6.22 crore. A split award of this kind leaves the losing party with an obvious target for a Section 34 challenge: if one arbitrator looked at the same file and reached the opposite conclusion, the argument runs, the majority's view cannot be the only reasonable one.
Bakshi took that argument to the Delhi High Court, contending that the majority had brushed aside clear evidence of additional work. His case rested substantially on a newspaper clipping reporting unusually heavy rainfall, which he said explained why the highway needed repairs over and above the scope the contract had fixed.
Justice Subramonium Prasad was not persuaded. The court found that the tribunal's majority had examined the record and reasonably concluded that Bakshi had not substantiated his claim of extra work. A party seeking payment for work outside a contract's defined scope carries the burden of showing what was actually done and why it fell outside that scope, and the majority's finding that this burden went unmet was not a conclusion the court was prepared to disturb.
The rainfall clipping did Bakshi no good either. The court noted, as the tribunal majority had already pointed out, that the report concerned rainfall at a location other than the stretch of highway in dispute. A document offered to explain conditions on one road cannot carry weight when it actually describes conditions somewhere else, and the mismatch undercut the central plank of his argument.
There was a second, independent reason the claim failed. The court accepted the tribunal's view that the repairs Bakshi pointed to fell within the contract's defect liability period, the window during which a maintenance contractor is expected to rectify defects at his own cost rather than bill the client afresh. Work falling inside that period does not become additional merely because the contractor later decides it was more extensive than he first thought.
On the scope of interference permitted under Section 34, the court repeated settled ground: a nil award is not inherently suspect, and a dissenting arbitrator's different view of the same evidence does not by itself open the door to setting aside the majority's award. Courts exercising supervisory jurisdiction over arbitral awards look for patent illegality or a conclusion no reasonable tribunal could reach, not for an alternative reading of the facts that a court might prefer. A dissent, however forcefully worded, remains one arbitrator's opinion; it does not convert the majority's reasoned view into a perverse one simply by existing. Finding neither patent illegality nor perversity in the majority's approach, the court declined to interfere.
The petition was accordingly dismissed, and the nil award in NHAI's favour stood undisturbed. For a contractor who had hoped a dissenting opinion would give the challenge extra weight, the outcome confirms that a split tribunal does not lower the bar a court applies under Section 34; if anything, the majority's explanation of why it rejected the dissent's reasoning gave the award an additional layer of insulation from review. For contractors pursuing claims against NHAI and similar authorities for work beyond a contract's stated scope, the ruling is a reminder that documentary proof has to match the claim in both substance and geography, and that a dissenting view inside the same tribunal offers little extra leverage once that threshold is not met.