Author: Anvita Dwivedi

The Supreme Court has delivered an important clarification on the scope of Section 69 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, holding that every broken promise of marriage cannot automatically be converted into a criminal prosecution for sexual intercourse obtained through deceitful means. The Court has emphasised that the decisive question is not simply whether the accused ultimately married the woman, but whether, at the very time the promise was made, he had no intention whatsoever of fulfilling it and used that false promise as a means of obtaining sexual relations. Where the subsequent refusal arises from circumstances that developed after…

The Supreme Court has rejected gangster Abu Salem’s plea seeking premature release from imprisonment in connection with the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case, bringing into sharp focus the difficult legal intersection between life imprisonment, remission, extradition assurances and India’s international obligations. A Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta upheld the Bombay High Court’s refusal to release Salem, holding that the 25-year period arising from the sovereign assurance given by India to Portugal cannot be further reduced by adding ordinary jail-earned remission to the period of actual incarceration. The ruling is significant because the Supreme Court was not simply…

The Supreme Court has reaffirmed an important principle of pension and service jurisprudence: where employees have rendered long and continuous service on contract, ad hoc, daily-wage or work-charge terms and are subsequently regularized, the employer cannot, merely by relying upon the date of formal regularization, erase the period of service already rendered for the purpose of determining qualifying service and pensionary entitlement. In Punjab School Education Board and Another v. Satnam Singh and Others, a Bench comprising Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra and Justice Shree Chandrashekhar dismissed the Punjab School Education Board’s appeal and upheld the entitlement of the employees to…

The Supreme Court has clarified an important transitional question concerning compensation for land acquired for national highways, holding that where the competent authority under the National Highways Act, 1956 determined compensation before January 1, 2015, the consequential benefits of solatium, interest and interest on solatium have to be computed under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, rather than under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. The decision in Manav Bhanot v. National Highway Authority of India is significant because it places the emphasis on the date on which compensation was determined, rather…

The Supreme Court has cleared the way for implementation of the resolution plan for the long-stalled Sushant Aquapolis housing project in Ghaziabad, adopting a pragmatic solution to an otherwise difficult conflict between insolvency resolution, development-control regulations and competing claims concerning access to the project land. The Court permitted the Successful Resolution Applicant, One City Infrastructure Private Limited, to develop a 24-metre-wide pathway along three boundaries of the project, while expressly prohibiting it from asserting any title over the land. The decision is significant because it places the practical revival of a distressed residential project and the interests of its homebuyers…

The Supreme Court has significantly clarified the law governing corporate criminal liability, holding that a company accused of an offence requiring mens rea cannot secure quashing of criminal proceedings merely because the investigating agency has not identified or arraigned a particular director, officer or employee as the natural person through whom the alleged offence was committed. In doing so, the Court has moved beyond the relatively settled proposition that corporations can possess a guilty mind and addressed the more difficult question that Indian criminal jurisprudence had largely left unanswered: whose state of mind can be attributed to a company, and…

The Supreme Court has referred to a larger Bench a significant question concerning the interpretation of Section 47-A of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899, asking whether stamp authorities can examine an allegedly undervalued instrument merely because they have reason to believe that the true market value has not been disclosed, or whether they must first possess material indicating that the parties deliberately undervalued the property with a fraudulent intention to evade stamp duty. The issue arises from the decision in Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited v. District Revenue Officer (Stamps) & Anr., where a Bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel…

In a remarkable series of criminal appeals decided during the first week of September 2026, the Supreme Court overturned three separate murder convictions from different states, placing investigative failures at the centre of its scrutiny. Across these judgments, the Court repeatedly observed that the criminal justice system cannot sustain convictions where investigations are casual, incomplete, manipulated, or conducted in disregard of established evidentiary principles. The decisions collectively send a powerful institutional message: defective investigations are not mere procedural irregularities they strike at the heart of a fair trial and the constitutional guarantee of due process. The judgments emerged from unrelated…

Justice Ashwani Kumar Mishra was sworn in as the Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court on September 7, 2026, bringing to a close the uncertainty surrounding the leadership of one of the country’s important constitutional courts, but simultaneously opening a significant constitutional conversation over the role of State governments in the appointment of High Court Chief Justices. The oath was administered by Punjab Governor Gulab Chand Kataria at Lok Bhawan, Chandigarh, in the presence of Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, Haryana Governor Ashim Kumar Ghosh, judges of the High Court and senior officials. Punjab Chief Minister…

The Supreme Court has taken a stringent view of deviations between what a real-estate developer represents to prospective homebuyers and what is ultimately delivered on the ground, observing that a housing project must be constructed in accordance with the representations contained in the brochure and project plan on the basis of which consumers purchased their homes. In proceedings concerning DLF Home Developers’ “The Primus” project in Gurugram, the Court has directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to proceed with a Preliminary Enquiry into the circumstances surrounding the project, while simultaneously making it clear that the developer cannot treat representations made…