Uchit Expressway Private Limited holds the concession for six-laning a 93.5 kilometre stretch of National Highway 76 between Chittorgarh and Udaipur in Rajasthan, built on a design-build-finance-operate-transfer toll basis. The company is a special purpose vehicle floated by TRIL Roads Private Limited, which runs the road portfolio of Tata Realty and Infrastructure, itself a Tata Sons subsidiary. The project was completed years ago and has been collecting toll since, but the concession agreement left behind a dispute large enough to go to arbitration before SAROD, the dispute body NHAI itself set up to keep highway contract fights out of the regular arbitration circuit. SAROD panels are drawn from a roster of retired judges and engineers familiar with road construction contracts, and NHAI has steadily pushed its concessionaires and EPC contractors toward this route rather than ad hoc arbitration, on the stated reasoning that disputes get resolved faster and by people who already understand how a BOT toll contract is structured.
The concessionaire's claims ran to about ₹366.53 crore. The single largest component, ₹238.18 crore, was pinned on delays and cost increases it said it suffered during the Covid period, the kind of claim that became routine across the highway sector once construction and traffic projections were disrupted by lockdowns and migrant labour shortages in 2020 and 2021. The tribunal did not accept it. Both the Ministry's own account and contemporaneous reporting agree that the Covid-linked claim was rejected along with the greater part of the concessionaire's other demands.
What the tribunal did allow is where the two available accounts start to diverge in emphasis rather than in substance. One account frames the outcome as an almost complete win for NHAI, with only a small residue of claims surviving. The other, relaying the Road Transport Ministry's own description of the award, says the tribunal did allow some claims beyond the rejected Covid demand and directed a conditional refund to the concessionaire. Neither account gives the net figure the concessionaire actually walks away with, and neither sets out NHAI's counterclaims, reportedly covering dropped project scope, highway maintenance shortfalls and unauthorised toll collection, in enough detail to say how those fared. A reader should treat the award as a substantial but not total defeat for Uchit Expressway, without assuming NHAI's counterclaims were vindicated to the same degree.
This is not an isolated result. NHAI has been racking up SAROD wins through this year on its BOT and toll contracts. A Bareilly-Sitapur toll dispute saw a concessionaire's claim of roughly ₹3,177 crore cut down to about ₹46 crore. Separately, a Tumkur-Chitradurga award in Karnataka went NHAI's way to the tune of over ₹1,200 crore. Put together with the Chittorgarh-Udaipur outcome, the pattern suggests SAROD tribunals have been unsympathetic to the broad Covid-disruption argument once a concessionaire tries to convert it into a large monetary claim without tying each rupee to a specific, provable loss.
For concessionaires still carrying Covid-era claims through arbitration, the lesson is in the proportions, not the principle. Tribunals have not shut the door on Covid as a ground for relief altogether, since some smaller claims in this very award were allowed. What appears to fail is the attempt to load an entire pandemic-period cost overrun onto the authority as a single undifferentiated demand. A claimant who cannot particularise each head of loss, and connect it to a specific contractual obligation NHAI failed to perform, is likely to see the bulk of that claim written off however large the headline figure looks.
NHAI and its law officers also have reason to read the run of favourable awards as a change in the calculus on settlement. An authority that keeps winning at SAROD has less reason to settle contractor claims short of arbitration, and more reason to let a dispute run its course even where a concessionaire is a large, well-resourced group company. Whether that pattern holds once these awards face challenge before the Delhi High Court under Section 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, where NHAI has not always fared as well, is the question that will decide how durable this run of SAROD victories really is. A tribunal composed of people experienced in highway engineering may read a delay claim with less patience for generalised pandemic narratives than a court would, but Section 34's narrow grounds of challenge, patent illegality, conflict with the fundamental policy of Indian law, or a breach of natural justice, do not let a disappointed concessionaire reopen the tribunal's assessment of evidence merely because it disagrees with how the claim was valued.