Litigation
under Indian law.
Indian civil litigation runs on a clock you cannot negotiate with: s.3 of the Limitation Act, 1963 requires a court to dismiss a time-barred suit even where limitation was never pleaded as a defence, and s.5 condonation reaches appeals and applications but never suits. Most commercial litigation is contract litigation — damages under s.73 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, the s.74 ceiling on stipulated penalties, and specific performance under the Specific Relief Act, 1963. This hub gathers the periods, the provisions and the LexVio capabilities that read a judgment or a contract before the clock runs out.
Last reviewed: 19 August 2026 · every citation on this page names the dataset it came from
- 9governing provisions
- 9product capabilities
- 1free tools
- 6limitation periods
- 3audiences
Litigation as an Indian practice area is really three clocks running at once. The first is the Schedule to the Limitation Act, 1963: Article 113 gives three years for any suit with no article of its own, Article 116 gives ninety days for a first appeal to a High Court and thirty days to any other court, Article 123 gives thirty days to set aside an ex parte decree, and Article 136 gives twelve years to execute a decree. The second is the substantive statute the claim arises under. The third is the procedural clock inside the court — restoration, review, revision and substitution each carry their own article.
What is actually fought in Indian commercial courts is largely contract. Section 73 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 gives compensation for loss that naturally arose from the breach; s.74 converts a stipulated penalty into reasonable compensation not exceeding the amount named, which is why liquidated-damages drafting matters long before a plaint is filed. Specific performance is governed by ss.10 and 14 of the Specific Relief Act, 1963, and s.20A bars injunctions that would impede an infrastructure project. Cheque-dishonour prosecutions under s.138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881 sit alongside all of this in sheer volume.
And there is a switch that turns the litigation off. Once a corporate debtor enters CIRP, s.14 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 declares a moratorium prohibiting the institution or continuation of suits, transfer of assets and recovery actions — so a solvency check on the defendant is part of assessing the claim, not an afterthought.
The provisions, with their section numbers.
Each row names the dataset it was taken from — the seeded statute library, the compliance calendar's own statutory reference, the bare Limitation Act, or the DPDP research set. Nothing here was written from memory.
Tools that apply to this work.
Each runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and none of them needs an account.
Limitation periods that bite here.
Quoted from the India Code bare Act. The period is only half the answer — the third column of the Schedule, the point from which time begins to run, is what actually decides the date. Each entry sets both out.
Three years.
(a) Ninety days; (b) Thirty days.
Thirty days.
Thirty days.
Twelve years.
Three years.
The capabilities that do this work.
Every one of these is a real feature page with its own status — Live, Beta or Soon. If it says Beta, it is in beta.
Judgments from SC, High Courts, NCLT, ITAT, CCI, DRT, and CESTAT.
See how cases cite each other — trace a doctrine forward and back.
What-if engines for litigation and contracts — outcome odds, damages, settlement, cheque-bounce, tax, and AI negotiation roleplay.
Group contracts, court research, and compliance items by matter.
Conversational Q&A over a single contract or matter with cited answers.
Semantic + keyword search across every document in your vault.
Get a synthesised answer with citations from every document at once.
Every edit is versioned. Diff any two versions side-by-side.
Apply your firm's logo, colours, and footer to exported risk reports.
The modules this area draws on.
Litigation — the questions people actually ask.
Can a court condone delay in filing a suit in India?
No. Section 5 of the Limitation Act, 1963 permits condonation of delay only for appeals and applications, never for suits. Section 3 goes further and requires the court to dismiss a time-barred suit 'although limitation has not been set up as a defence'. A late suit is not a weak suit — it is not a suit at all. Section 5 also carves out applications under Order XXI CPC, so a late execution application cannot be condoned either.
What resets a limitation period once it has started?
Two things principally: a written acknowledgment of liability signed by the party under s.18, and a part-payment acknowledged in the payer's handwriting or signed writing under s.19. Both give a fresh period, but only if made BEFORE the current period expires — acknowledging an already-barred debt creates no fresh period under the Act. Separately, ss.12-15 and s.17 exclude specific stretches of time (certified-copy time, stay periods, proceedings in a court without jurisdiction, and time before fraud or mistake is discovered).
Does LexVio give litigation advice or predict case outcomes?
No. LexVio ships a research corpus of judgments from the Supreme Court, High Courts, NCLT, ITAT, CCI, DRT and CESTAT, a citation graph that traces how cases cite each other, and 'legal simulators' — what-if engines for outcome odds, damages, settlement and cheque-bounce scenarios. Those are analytical aids that show their working and their sources. They are not advice, and no simulator output is a prediction of what a court will do on your facts.
Where do the limitation periods on this site come from?
From the India Code bare-Act PDF of the Limitation Act, 1963, text-extracted locally rather than paraphrased from commentary — including the Act's own printing errors, preserved with bracketed corrections. The Limitation Period Finder carries 64 Schedule articles plus four deadlines that live in other statutes (Arbitration Act s.34(3), NI Act ss.138/142, IBC s.61(2) and Consumer Protection Act s.69), and it names the articles it deliberately leaves out.
A map of the material, not advice on your matter. These hubs point at statutory text, free calculators and product capabilities. They are not legal advice, they do not create an advocate-client relationship, and they are no substitute for reading the bare Act as currently amended. Indian law is fact- and state-specific — stamp duty, registration and several employment obligations vary by state, and limitation turns on facts a web page cannot know. Take advice on your own facts before acting.
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