NEW DELHI: The Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant on Monday said that 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 in New Delhi, Kant said that 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 CJI observed best dispute resolution is the one least used. "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.
The CJI emphasised that infrastructure contracts should create shared understanding of how parties respond to unforeseen circumstances. He said early intervention, frank communication and swift determinations could prevent disagreements from hardening into formal claims.
Highlighting the time sensitivity of projects, 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 parties debate meaning of force majeure clause."
Calling for sensible standardisation of infrastructure contracts, 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.
Kant said India’s infrastructure development is unfolding at an unprecedented scale and pace, with the ambition to build faster, more resiliently, sustainably, and productively than ever before.
CJI urged all the stakeholders, whether from government, industry or the legal profession, to focus on clarity of obligations, balanced risk allocation, standardisation, early dispute avoidance and swift, independent resolution of disputes. He said these were instruments of good governance and not merely legal technicalities in the fullest sense.