The argument was that anyone whose limitation expired during COVID got ninety days and no more. That reads the direction backwards
The Supreme Court excluded 15 March 2020 to 28 February 2022 from every limitation period. The Delhi High Court holds that exclusion enlarges time over and above what the statute gives — and a suit filed 19 months later was in time.
The Supreme Court's orders in In Re: Cognizance for Extension of Limitation are among the most frequently cited directions of the last decade, and they are still producing disputes about what they actually did. Four years after the last of them, the question in this case was whether they gave litigants ninety days or considerably more.
On 25 September 2026 Justice Anish Dayal answered it, dismissing a civil revision against a trial court's refusal to reject a plaint as time-barred.
The dates
There was no dispute about the starting point: limitation began on 24 October 2018, and the three-year period would expire on 23 October 2021.
That expiry falls inside the window the Supreme Court excluded — 15 March 2020 to 28 February 2022 — so the fourth and final direction applied.
The suit was filed on 9 October 2023, roughly nineteen months after the COVID period ended.
The competing readings
Counsel for the petitioner argued from the text of the third clause of the fourth direction: where limitation would have expired between 15 March 2020 and 28 February 2022, all persons shall have a limitation period of ninety days from 1 March 2022. On that reading, the plaintiff had until roughly the end of May 2022, and a suit filed in October 2023 was long out of time.
The Court held that this does not take account of what the directions primarily did.
The primary directive, stated categorically in the second direction and reiterated in the third and fourth, was that in computing the period of limitation for any suit the COVID period stands excluded. The end date moved as the pandemic ran on — 14 March 2021 under the second direction, 2 October 2021 under the third, 28 February 2022 under the fourth — but the mechanism was always exclusion.
Once a direction for exclusion is given, the period that fell within the COVID window automatically becomes available from 1 March 2022.
The Court grounded that in the Supreme Court's own explanation in Prakash Corporates, which clarified that where a particular period is liable to be excluded in relation to any suit or proceeding — whether owing to circumstances or to the requirements of law — the excluded period results in an enlargement of time over and above the limitation period otherwise prescribed. The point had also been addressed by a Division Bench of the same Court in Shri Jai Prakash Tayal.
Read that way, the ninety-day clause does different work than the petitioner supposed. It is a floor, not a ceiling — a minimum guaranteed to everyone whose limitation expired during the window, and the fourth direction says so expressly in its closing words: where the actual balance period remaining from 1 March 2022 is greater than ninety days, that longer period applies.
The computation
Applying the exclusion, the Court worked out the arithmetic and set it out, with a diagram in the judgment for ease of reference.
The balance available to the plaintiff came to 19 months and 11 days, running from 1 March 2022 and exhausting on 11 October 2023. The suit was filed on 9 October 2023 — two days inside.
The Court noted that on the fullest view, the entire excluded stretch of approximately 23 months and 13 days would be available, which would place the suit comfortably within time on any calculation.
The order
Finding nothing amiss in the trial court's order, the Court dismissed the petition, rendered the pending applications infructuous, and directed that the judgment be uploaded on the Court's website.
Why this still matters in 2026
Suits filed in 2023 and 2024 on causes of action from 2018 and 2019 are now reaching the stage where limitation objections are argued, and the pattern in this case will recur for some years yet.
The distinction the judgment draws is worth stating plainly for anyone running or meeting such an objection. Exclusion and extension are not the same operation. An extension replaces the old deadline with a new one; an exclusion removes a stretch of time from the count, so whatever was left when the exclusion began is still left when it ends. A defendant who computes ninety days from 1 March 2022 and stops there is applying the guarantee in the direction while ignoring the rule it sits inside.