A company that built and operates a stretch of national highway under a Build-Operate-Transfer arrangement with the National Highways Authority of India went to the Meghalaya High Court not over the road itself, but over how the taxman wanted to treat the annuity payments it receives for running it. Jorabat Shillong Expressway Limited holds a BOT Annuity concession for the four-laning of the Jorabat-Shillong section of NH-40, and the GST department had slapped it with a demand of roughly Rs 112.39 crore on the annuity payments it collects under that concession.
The company's argument on the underlying tax question was that its services fell under Service Accounting Code 9967 and qualified for exemption under Entry 23A of Notification 12/2017-Central Tax (Rate). It also challenged the validity of CBIC Circular 150/06/2021-GST, the circular the department had relied on to classify and tax the annuity payments in the first place. Rather than wait for the department's order and then appeal it, the company went straight to the High Court by way of a writ petition, asking the court to intervene before the ordinary appellate process ran its course.
The government's response was procedural rather than substantive: it did not spend much effort defending the tax demand on the merits at this stage, and instead argued that the writ was simply not the right vehicle. Section 107 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act gives an aggrieved taxpayer a statutory right of appeal, and the respondents argued that this efficacious alternate remedy meant the High Court should decline to entertain the writ petition at all.
The court agreed with the government on that threshold point. It held that writ jurisdiction under Article 226 of the Constitution cannot ordinarily be invoked where an effective statutory appellate remedy is available, and it found no exceptional circumstance here that would justify bypassing that remedy. The petition was dismissed on maintainability grounds, without the court ruling on whether the GST demand itself was correctly raised or whether the exemption the company claimed actually applied.
To soften the blow of dismissal, the court gave the company liberty to file a statutory appeal under Section 107 within four weeks, which meant the writ's failure did not close off the company's ability to contest the tax demand altogether. It simply redirected that fight to the forum Parliament had designed for it, leaving the substantive questions, the SAC classification, the Entry 23A exemption claim, and the validity of the CBIC circular, open for the appellate authority to decide.
The ruling fits a well-established pattern in Indian tax litigation where courts are reluctant to let writ petitions substitute for the statutory appeal process, reserving writ intervention for cases involving a clear jurisdictional error, a breach of natural justice, or a challenge to the vires of a provision rather than ordinary disputes over classification and exemption. A circular's validity can sometimes justify a direct writ challenge, but the court evidently did not think the company's challenge to Circular 150/06/2021-GST, as framed here, cleared that bar.
For BOT and other PPP concessionaires facing GST demands on annuity or similar periodic payments, the case is a caution against reaching for a writ petition as a first resort. Where a statutory appeal exists and no exceptional circumstance is shown, that appeal is where the fight over classification and exemption needs to happen, and a writ filed instead risks losing months to a maintainability dismissal before the substantive tax question is even addressed. Reports indicate the company has since pressed the matter further, including before the Supreme Court, which suggests the underlying taxability question raised here is far from settled even as this particular writ petition met a procedural end.
The dismissal also carries a cost that goes beyond the legal fees spent on a writ that never reached the merits. A concessionaire running a toll or annuity-based highway project operates on contracted cash flows set well in advance, and a GST demand of this size sitting unresolved for months while a writ works through a maintainability objection is itself a real financial burden, even before any appeal on the substance begins. The case is also a reminder that GST disputes tied to infrastructure concession structures sit at the intersection of two different bodies of law, the concession framework governing how a BOT project is built and operated, and the tax statute deciding how its revenue streams get classified, and that courts asked to intervene tend to treat the tax question as a tax question first, resolvable through the statute's own appellate machinery rather than through the infrastructure context.