NHAI has defeated a ₹3,177 crore claim over a Uttar Pradesh highway project, with the tribunal ordering it to pay just ₹46 crore.

The dispute traces back to the Bareilly-Sitapur toll road, a 151 km stretch that NHAI had handed over to Bareilly Highways Project Limited, a company promoted by Era Infra Engineering.

That contract fell apart in May 2019, when NHAI terminated it, and the matter eventually landed before a three member Arbitral Tribunal.

The concessionaire came in swinging, raising 30 separate claims that added up to roughly ₹3,177 crore.

After going through everything, the tribunal sided largely with NHAI, allowing only three of those claims, worth ₹46 crore plus interest, and rejecting the rest.

The tribunal also upheld a supplementary agreement from March 2015 and found that the project delays were shared between both sides rather than NHAI’s fault alone.

NHAI had filed its own counterclaims too, covering financial losses and public inconvenience, though the tribunal did not accept those either. This isn’t a one off.

NHAI has been racking up wins in arbitration lately. Back in June, it secured a ₹1,202 crore favourable ruling in a case tied to the Tumkur-Chitradurga highway project in Karnataka.

In April, two separate disputes over the Panipat-Jalandhar highway, where the concessionaire had sought around ₹8,375 crore and NHAI had counterclaimed ₹2,888.64 crore, were resolved with a payout of just ₹819.96 crore in NHAI’s favour.

And in May, a ₹174.49 crore claim linked to the Kamrej-Chalthan stretch of NH-48 in Gujarat was settled for a mere ₹54 lakh.

Taken together, these outcomes point to NHAI tightening up how it manages contracts and fights legal battles, something that ultimately protects taxpayer money tied up in India’s highway network.

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