The clock under Section 34 never started, because the arbitrator never delivered a signed award to the party
Justice N.J. Jamadar held that a copy reaching someone on behalf of the advocate does not discharge the statutory obligation, and declared the petition not time-barred.
Section 34(3) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 gives a party three months to challenge an award, running from the date on which it received the award. The award here was passed on 30 June 2025 and a signed copy reached the losing party's advocate two days later; the petition was presented on 3 November 2025. On 6 October 2026 the Bombay High Court held that limitation had never begun to run, because what the statute requires is delivery of a signed copy by the arbitrator to the party, and that never happened.
A payment that went somewhere else
The underlying dispute came out of a contract of 1 February 2018 under which the respondent supplied marine paints to the applicant's vessels and raised an invoice for USD 82,970.28. The applicant said it had credited the payment through banking channels to the respondent's account with a bank in Australia. The respondent said it had never received the money.
It then emerged that the amount credited had been fraudulently siphoned off, and the matter was reported to the police. The respondent invoked arbitration, a sole arbitrator was appointed by the High Court, and the arbitration ended in an award on 30 June 2025.
The two provisions read together
Section 34(3) says an application to set aside an award may not be made after three months have elapsed from the date on which the party making it received the award, with a proviso allowing a further thirty days, but not more, where the Court is satisfied the applicant was prevented by sufficient cause. Section 31(5) says that after the award is made, the arbitral tribunal is to deliver a signed copy of it to each party.
Read together, the Court held, the limitation for a petition under Section 34(3) commences from the date a signed copy of the award is delivered to the party that applies to set it aside. Two dates therefore matter: when the signed copy was delivered, which fixes the start of limitation, and when the petition was filed, which decides whether it falls inside three months and the extendable thirty days — a limit beyond which the Court is denuded of the power to condone delay at all.
Who the award has to reach
A signed copy of the award was received on 2 July 2025, but not by the applicant and not directly by its advocate: it was taken by a person on behalf of the advocate on record. The question was whether that started the clock.
The Court held it did not. The delivery of a signed copy of an arbitral award by the arbitrator is the mandate of the law, and because timelines for every further step run from receipt of that signed copy, any deviation from the obligation to deliver it cannot be countenanced. That the aggrieved party somehow comes into possession of a copy of the award from some other source is not of material significance.
The reasoning is practical as well as textual. If informal receipt were enough, the starting point of limitation would turn on assertions and counter-assertions about who had what and when, obscuring a question the statute keeps clear and unambiguous.
The consequence on these facts
Applying that, the Court found that the sole arbitrator did not deliver the signed copy of the award to the applicant. Receipt by a person on behalf of the applicant's advocate did not discharge the statutory obligation. The period of limitation therefore cannot be said to have commenced on 2 July 2025 in the strict sense, and in the absence of any other credible material showing that the arbitrator delivered a signed copy at any later point, the presentation of the petition on 3 November 2025 is not barred under Section 34(3).
Order
The application was allowed. The Court declared that the petition filed on 3 November 2025 is not time-barred, and directed that the petition be registered and listed for admission on 14 October 2026.