Infrastructure needs preventive, not retrospective justice: CJI Kant

CJI Surya Kant said the infrastructure ecosystem must shift from 'retrospective' to 'preventive justice' by designing contracts that address disagreements before they become disputes, ensuring projects are not stalled by lengthy arbitration or appeals.

Preventive Over Retrospective Justice

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Monday said the infrastructure ecosystem must shift from “retrospective justice” to “preventive justice” by designing contractual and institutional frameworks that address disagreements before they turn into disputes.

Addressing the FIDIC Global Infrastructure Conference 2026 here, the CJI said the Rule of Law was not merely about courts correcting errors after a project had been disrupted, but also about ensuring clear expectations, properly defined powers, fair allocation of risks and credible, timely dispute resolution mechanisms.

“The finest compliment to a dispute resolution mechanism is not that it has resolved many disputes, but that the project it served had so little need to use it,” he said.

“A bridge cannot pause construction while an arbitration proceeds; a highway cannot wait for an appeal to run its course; and a power project cannot suspend its economic purpose while the parties debate the meaning of a force majeure clause,” he observed.

Standardisation and Good Governance

Calling for sensible standardisation of infrastructure contracts, Justice Kant said provisions relating to payments, variations, extensions of time, unforeseen conditions and dispute resolution should not be reinvented for every project.

At the same time, he cautioned that local laws, capacity and circumstances must be accommodated.

He said India’s infrastructure development was taking place at a scale and pace without precedent in its past, and its ambition must be to build “faster, more resiliently, more sustainably and more productively”.

The CJI urged stakeholders to focus on clarity of obligations, balanced risk allocation, standardisation, early dispute avoidance and swift, independent resolution of disputes. These, he said, were “instruments of good governance” and not merely legal technicalities. (ANI)

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