A concessionaire that terminated its concession agreement with the National Highways Authority of India in 2019 and went after it for over three thousand crore rupees has come away with less than two per cent of what it asked for. An Arbitral Tribunal has allowed only three of the thirty claims raised by Bareilly Highways Project Limited, totalling about Rs 46 crore plus applicable interest, against a demand of roughly Rs 3,177 crore, in an award disclosed through an official NHAI statement issued on 27 July 2026.
The dispute goes back to the Bareilly-Sitapur BOT toll project in Uttar Pradesh, a 151-kilometre highway stretch that NHAI terminated in May 2019. The concessionaire behind the project, Bareilly Highways Project Limited, is a company promoted by Era Infra Engineering. Once the concession ended, BHPL took the dispute to arbitration, raising thirty separate claims that together ran into the thousands of crores, covering losses it said it suffered over the life of the project and on termination.
Central to the Tribunal's reasoning was a Supplementary Agreement dated 30 March 2015, which it treated as governing the parties' rights and obligations for the period in dispute. Working from that agreement, the Tribunal concluded that the delays which plagued the project were concurrent, meaning both NHAI and the concessionaire bore responsibility for the slippages, rather than the fault lying with NHAI alone as BHPL's claims assumed. That single finding did most of the work in the award. Once the delays were treated as shared rather than attributable to NHAI, the bulk of BHPL's claims for losses flowing from those delays had no basis to stand on.
The Tribunal did not reject every claim outright. It allowed three of the thirty, worth about Rs 46 crore together with applicable interest, while dismissing the remaining twenty-seven. NHAI did not come away with everything it wanted either. It had filed counterclaims against BHPL, and the Tribunal declined to allow any of those as well. The net result leaves BHPL with a small fraction of what it sought, and NHAI without any affirmative recovery of its own, though NHAI's own public statement framed the outcome squarely as a win given how far short the allowed amount fell of the claimed amount.
What the reporting does not establish is as significant as what it does. None of the available accounts name the members of the three-person Tribunal, and none reproduce the award's text beyond the figures and the concurrent-delay finding that NHAI's statement chose to highlight. The coverage traces back almost entirely to that one official statement, repeated across multiple outlets with only minor variation in phrasing. Whether BHPL intends to challenge the award under Section 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, as concessionaires in comparable NHAI disputes have done before, is not something the current reporting addresses.
Even allowing for that gap, the award fits a pattern that has become familiar in India's highway sector. BOT concessionaires terminated mid-contract routinely value their claims in the thousands of crores, covering lost equity returns, unrecovered debt, and the premium they say they would have earned over the remaining concession period. NHAI, as respondent in most of these references, has an equally consistent record of arguing that the termination was justified and the claimed losses inflated. Awards like this one, where a tribunal accepts NHAI's characterisation of the delay as shared rather than solely attributable to the authority, tend to gut such claims almost entirely, since concurrent delay findings cut off compensation for the downstream consequences of delay regardless of which party terminated the contract.
For concessionaires sizing up whether to pursue termination claims against NHAI, the case is a reminder that the size of the claim filed bears little relation to what a tribunal is likely to award once it works through the delay history on the facts. For NHAI, which answers to the public exchequer for every rupee it pays out on terminated BOT contracts, an award of this kind is the outcome it will point to whenever a similarly large claim is filed against it elsewhere.