Practice Areas

Construction & Infrastructure Arbitration

Awards, challenges, and the contract file that sits underneath them — for contractors, employers, and public bodies.

Construction arbitration in India is rarely a clean damages exercise. It is a dispute about what the drawings said, what the site allowed, who certified what, and whether the tribunal stayed inside the contract. The chamber’s work in this area is built around that record: the GCC, the special conditions, the FIDIC book where it applies, measurement, correspondence, and the award.

What this covers

  • Petitions under Section 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 to set aside construction and infrastructure awards
  • Enforcement under Section 36, including objections and deposit / stay applications
  • Section 9 and Section 17 interim measures — stop-work, security, and preservation of the contract status
  • References and appointments, including DIAC-administered arbitrations
  • Claims on delay, prolongation, disruption, variation, price adjustment, and idle resources
  • Mobilisation advances, recovery of unadjusted advances, and availability certificates
  • FIDIC-based contracts (Red / Yellow / Silver) and Indian public works forms (CPWD, MES, NHAI, state PWDs, PSUs)

Typical instructions

A contractor who has an award and faces a Section 34 challenge; an employer who says the tribunal rewrote the contract; a dispute over whether an availability certificate, or the want of one, suspended time. These are paper-heavy matters. They are not argued well from a two-page brief.

How the work is approached

The first cut is always the award against the contract. Patent illegality, public policy, and the limits of Section 34 are not slogans — they are a filter. If the real complaint is that the tribunal preferred one delay analysis over another, the High Court is usually not the place to retry it. If the tribunal ignored a binding clause, or granted a head of claim the contract shut out, that is a different petition.

See also the note on challenging a construction award under Section 34.

Discuss a construction matter