Post-award Interim Relief To An Unsuccessful Party: How Section 9 Relief Can Reshape High-value Commercial Arbitrations?

Interim relief plays a vital role in the arbitration process. It can preserve assets, secure disputed sums, restrain the invocation of bank guarantees, or otherwise maintain the status quo to help protect the subject matter of a dispute and prevent an eventual award from becoming fruitless.

This relief has long been available to all parties under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (Act); however, the right of an unsuccessful party to avail such relief post-award has remained unsettled. In a recent decision in Home Care Retail Marts Pvt Ltd v. Haresh N Sanghavi,¹ the Supreme Court settled the law, holding that an unsuccessful party can also seek post-award interim relief under Section 9, relying on the unqualified language of the provision. Importantly, the ruling dictates a markedly higher threshold for the grant of interim relief in such cases.

With this landmark judgment, the uncertainty emanating from contrasting judicial decisions on this issue has come to an end, entailing significant consequences for parties involved in high-value commercial arbitrations. This note examines some of the key highlights that might necessitate re-examination of their dispute strategy:

• Heightened potential for freezing assets: An unsuccessful party with a genuine claim and solid grounds for challenging the award now has an added lever for protecting the subject matter of the dispute in addition to a stay of the award's enforcement under Section 36(3) of the Act. While even the grant of stay left the successful party otherwise free to deal with or alienate its assets while the challenge remained pending, interim relief under Section 9 now closes that gap. This is also relevant in the case of partial awards wherein one party that wins a particular claim but loses a larger counter-claim is branded ‘unsuccessful’, allowing such an ‘unsuccessful’ party to sever the award (as recognised in Gayatri Balaswamy²), and seek to prevent the alienation of assets before the Section 34 challenge is even decided. This makes asset planning and enforcement strategy relevant much earlier, including before the Section 34 challenge is decided
• Elongated timelines: Unlike an order under Section 36(3) of the Act (seeking stay on the enforcement of an award), an order granting or dismissing interim relief under Section 9 is appealable, significantly enhancing the possibility of an additional round of litigation and elongated timelines before an award is finally enforced. This carries a potentially serious impact on arbitration, a forum based on efficiency and timely resolution, as litigants may misuse this provision.
• Confidentiality protection: Once an award is challenged before a Court under Section 34 of the Act, the confidential documents and pleadings relied upon during the arbitration can become public information, risking the loss of confidentiality. Confidentiality may be sought as an interim measure by the party seeking to challenge the award, as the ruling expressly permits the grant of ‘non-prejudicial’ interim relief that does not affect the enforceability of the award and merely preserves ancillary rights.

In this judgment, the Court was alive to the risk that a well-resourced losing party could misuse this route to delay enforcement. It has, accordingly, built in an express safeguard: relief for an unsuccessful party should be granted only in ‘rare and compelling’ cases, subject to a ‘higher threshold,’ with Courts urged to proceed with ‘care, caution and circumspection’. Substantively, this is not a free-standing test – the Court reaffirmed that the ordinary Section 9 yardsticks continue to apply: a good prima facie case, balance of convenience, likelihood of irreparable harm, and reasonable expedition in approaching the Court, as laid down in Essar House Pvt Ltd v. ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India Ltd.³  Recently, in National Projects Construction Corporation v. Ishvakoo (India),⁴ an award-debtor whose claims had been dismissed in full sought interim relief under Section 9 of the Act to recover INR 3.5 crore that had been encashed by the award holder under bank guarantees shortly before the award. With a challenge to the award pending, it was held that the ‘rare and compelling case’ threshold was met for allowing interim relief to the award-debtor. While the Court did not order a refund, it directed that the encashed sum be deposited with the Registry in an interest-bearing fixed deposit.

The Home Care decision substantially widens the interim-relief toolkit available during the post-award, pre-enforcement window – a window that, in high-value commercial disputes, can stretch across years, and during which the risk of asset dissipation or irreversible prejudice is at its highest – without disturbing the finality of arbitral awards.

Footnotes

^{1 2026 INSC 415} 

^{2 Gayatri Balasamy v. ISG Novasoft Technologies Ltd, 2025 INSC 605}

^{3 (2022) 20 SCC 178}

^{4 2026 INSC 828}

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.