SC to hear DMRC plea against arbitration award

The five-judge Supreme Court (SC) bench will on February 15 hear the Delhi Metro Rail Corp's (DMRC) curative petition seeking reversal of the apex court's 2021 judgment upholding a ₹4,700-crore arbitration award that Delhi Airport Metro Express (DAMEPL), a subsidiary of Reliance Infrastructure, won against the former in May 2017.

At the outset, a bench led by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud said that its tentative view is to constitute a five-judge bench to hear the case. "...Normally, the two judges who wrote the judgment have to sit (in curative). They have retired... My tentative view is we can hear in combination of five (judges)," it said.

Meanwhile, senior counsel Harish Salve and Mukul Rohatgi said the grounds for filing the curative petition by DMRC were not met in the case, therefore, it should be rejected.


Salve argued, "I am flabbergasted that no ground for entertaining a curative petition is made out. Let them state specifically the ground on which curative is sought."

Rohatgi, also appearing for the RInfra subsidiary, said, "We have taken a preliminary objection to this petition. Neither violation of natural justice nor any other ground mentioned in Rupa Ashok Hurra case is made out." DAMEPL operated the Capital's airport metro service until 2013 before cancelling the contract with DMRC citing safety issues and invoked arbitration.

In 2017, Delhi Airport Metro Express had won a ₹4,700 crore arbitration award against Delhi Metro Rail Corp. The arbitral tribunal had accepted the claim of the RInfra firm that running trains on the airport line wasn't viable due to structural defects in the viaduct made by Delhi Metro Rail. Since then, the amount with interest has swelled to round ₹9,000 crore.