Shashwati Chowdhury
Published on: August 16, 2022 at 19:52 IST
The Madras High Court recently granted BSNL, a state-owned telecom company, permission to initiate a De Novo arbitration proceeding against the ISHA foundation in order to pursue its claim for unpaid dues.
The current arbitral award, which was made without consulting an expert committee and without giving proper consideration to the facts, was clearly incorrect, the Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy court noted in its order.
ISHA Foundation, the respondent, had submitted an application for a service connection known as the Global System of Mobile Communications Primary Rate Interface (GSM PRI). A total of 400 numbers were later added to the initial 100 Direct Inward Dialing (DID) numbers that were made available for this connection.
Nevertheless, the respondents disputed the bills for the months of December 2018 and January 2019, claiming that there were connectivity issues and that despite complaints, these complaints were not resolved.
In the meantime, the respondent foundation sought a directive from the High Court to stop the petitioners in this case from seeking payment for the bills. Mr. Justice E. Padmanabhan was chosen by the High Court to serve as the sole arbitrator in the case.
After reviewing the averments, the court concluded that the issue between the parties called for an expert opinion.
In the current instance, such a situation was not present. As a result, the arbitral tribunal did not need the parties’ permission to call for expert testimony in the absence of an agreement between them.
The court came to the conclusion that even while the Arbitral Tribunal had taken the CDRs into account, it had also noted that further research was necessary. In addition, the arbitral tribunal came to the conclusion that the petitioner was entitled to Rs. 22, 000 despite the absence of such an expert.
The court overturned the tribunal’s award after finding it to be patently errorneous and allowed the petitioners to begin de novo arbitration proceedings. The Arbitration and Conciliation Act also provided the petitioners with the benefit of limitation.
