One steel plant, twenty-eight Supreme Court orders, four years of "early hearing" applications, and the doctrine that never quite landed
Kalyani Transco v. Bhushan Power and Steel Ltd. & Ors. · Civil Appeal No. 1808 of 2020 · 28 Supreme Court orders + 1 Delhi HC order + 4 NCLT/NCLAT orders · Spanning 26 July 2017 to 19 March 2024 · Corporate debtor: Bhushan Power and Steel Ltd. · Successful resolution applicant: JSW Steel Ltd. (2019)
What was Bhushan Power worth, and who wanted it?
Bhushan Power and Steel Limited was, in 2017, one of the twelve companies on the Reserve Bank of India’s first list of large stressed assets that the central bank directed to be referred to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. Steel plant at Sambalpur in Odisha; secondary processing at Chandigarh and Kolkata. Owed banks approximately ₹47,000 crore at admission. Promoter: the Singhal family.
CIRP was admitted by the NCLT Principal Bench on 26 July 2017.
The CoC was constituted; Punjab National Bank was the lead financial creditor. Multiple resolution plans were received. The CoC, by the requisite majority, approved JSW Steel’s plan: ₹19,700 crore upfront to creditors. The NCLT approved the plan in September 2019. The NCLAT, in a series of orders culminating in February 2020, affirmed it with some modifications.
That ought to have been the end of the matter. It was not.
Why did a losing bidder appeal a plan that the CoC had already approved?
Kalyani Transco, a competing bidder that had lost the CoC vote, filed Civil Appeal No. 1808 of 2020 in the Supreme Court in early 2020. The challenge ran on multiple fronts: the eligibility of JSW Steel under Section 29A given certain group affiliations; the validity of the CoC’s commercial-wisdom call; alleged procedural irregularities; the treatment of operational creditors.
The first hearing — 6 March 2020 — produced a recorded order.
“S U P R E M E C O U R T O F I N D I A · RECORD OF PROCEEDINGS · Civil Appeal No(s). 1808/2020 · KALYANI TRANSCO Appellant(s) · VERSUS · M/S BHUSHAN POWER AND STEEL LTD. Respondent(s)”
Five days later, India went into pandemic lockdown. The case adjourned.
How does a single appeal generate 28 Supreme Court orders?
Between 6 March 2020 and 19 March 2024, this single civil appeal generated, in our corpus, twenty-eight separate Supreme Court orders — most of them brief, procedural, recording adjournments, clarifications, interlocutory applications, or directions on implementation pending the substantive hearing.
| Year | SC orders | What dominated |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 6 | First hearing; pandemic; multiple early-hearing applications |
| 2021 | 5 | Promoter-family interventions; ED-attachment overlay |
| 2022 | 3 | First moves toward final hearing; Delhi HC writ on ₹53 crore demand |
| 2023 | 11 | The longest-pending year; “to be listed” orders |
| 2024 | 3 | Up to March 2024 (corpus cutoff); appeal still pending |
A reader unfamiliar with Indian Supreme Court process should pause on that 2023 row. Eleven orders in a single year in a single civil appeal, almost all of them procedural — “to be taken up in the first ten matters”, “to be listed”, “early hearing applications heard, to be listed in due course”.
The latest 2024 order, dated 19 March 2024, begins:
“ITEM NO. 15 SECTION XVII · S U P R E M E C O U R T O F I N D I A · RECORD OF PROCEEDINGS · Civil Appeal No. 1808/2020 · KALYANI TRANSCO Appellant(s) VERSUS M/S BHUSHAN POWER AND STEEL LTD. Respondent(s) · [ TO BE TAKEN UP IN THE FIRST TEN MATTERS ] (IA No. 160529/2022 CLARIFICATION/DIRECTION, IA No. 8922/2021 - EARLY HEARING APPLICATION, IA No. 1909/2021 - EARLY HEARING APPLICATION, IA No. 115750/2020 - EARLY HEARING APPLICATION, IA No. 48179/2022 - EARLY HEARING APPLICATION, IA No. 94590/2020 - EARLY HEARING APPLICATION, IA No. 71109/2021 - EARLY HEARING APPLICATION …”
Six separate “early hearing application” IAs, the oldest from 2020, on the docket of an appeal that has been pending since 2020. The phrase early hearing is, by 2024, somewhere between euphemism and absurdity.
How did the Enforcement Directorate enter the story?
In October 2019, while the NCLT was still considering JSW’s plan, the Enforcement Directorate attached approximately ₹4,025 crore of Bhushan Power assets under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act — alleging that the Singhal-family promoter loans had been diverted. This created a clash between two statutes: the IBC, which says the resolution plan is binding under Section 31 once approved, and the PMLA, which empowers the ED to attach proceeds of crime regardless of who currently holds them.
That conflict produced its own line of litigation. Manish Kumar v. Union of India (cited 68 times in this corpus) handled the constitutionality of Section 32A of the IBC, which had been inserted by the 2020 amendment specifically to protect resolution applicants from PMLA attachments in respect of the corporate debtor’s pre-resolution conduct. The Supreme Court upheld Section 32A.
Translation: once a plan is approved, the ED cannot attach the corporate debtor’s assets for offences allegedly committed by pre-resolution management. JSW Steel took comfort from Section 32A. The ED disagreed about scope. The Singhal family appealed against attachment orders. Each strand spawned its own Supreme Court proceedings, of which the Kalyani Transco appeal is only the headline.
What was the Delhi High Court doing about a ₹53 crore demand?
A separate Delhi High Court writ — Bhushan Power v. Union of India, W.P.(C) 7248/2020 (Delhi HC, 21 July 2022) — was filed by the Monitoring Professional Mahender Kumar Khandelwal (the IP who supervises plan implementation) challenging a ₹53 crore demand raised by the Revenue against the corporate debtor after the resolution plan had been approved. The High Court, applying the Ghanshyam Mishra clean-slate doctrine, held the demand extinguished.
What is this saga actually about?
Strip the saga of its surface and three things are happening at once.
First, Kalyani Transco is a CoC-commercial-wisdom challenge. A losing bidder is asking the Supreme Court to second-guess what the CoC decided in 2019 — that JSW Steel was the right resolution applicant. The Essar Steel doctrine says CoCs decide; Vidarbha opened a small window for judicial scrutiny; Kalyani Transco sits in that window, unresolved.
Second, the case is a stress test for the Section 31 / Section 32A boundary. If a resolution plan binds the Crown (per Ghanshyam Mishra) and shields the corporate debtor from PMLA attachments (per Section 32A), then JSW’s plan should be implementable. But every year, new claimants — tax departments, the ED, secured creditors who missed deadlines, operational creditors who felt short-changed — appear in the docket testing those boundaries.
Third, the case has become a monument to delay. Bhushan Power was admitted into CIRP in July 2017. JSW Steel’s plan was approved in September 2019. As of the corpus cutoff in March 2024 — more than four and a half years after plan approval — the case is still alive in the Supreme Court. The 330-day clock in Section 12(3) ran out in mid-2018.
What does the corpus not show?
The endgame. The substantive hearing of Civil Appeal No. 1808/2020 remained pending as of the cutoff. What the corpus records is the four-year procedural prelude to a decision yet to come. A reader curious about the outcome should look beyond this magazine to the live cause-list status; this magazine reports what eight years of IBC orders held as of late 2024, and on that count the Kalyani Transco appeal is the IBC’s most spectacular unresolved matter.
Why this story matters for the IBC at eight
The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code was sold to Parliament in 2016 as a time-bound statute. The CIRP clock was, theoretically, 270 days in 2016 and 330 days from 2019 onwards. Bhushan Power’s CIRP took about 26 months from admission to plan approval. Plan implementation has taken — as of the cutoff — a further 54 months and is still being litigated.
That is the IBC, in one case. The Code admits more than it resolves; the orders that resolve are appealed; the appeals run for years on “early hearing” applications that never produce early hearings; and the doctrine — Section 29A eligibility, CoC commercial wisdom, Section 32A shielding — never settles, because every saga produces a new wrinkle and every wrinkle goes to the Supreme Court.
A statute meant to deliver speed has delivered, instead, an extraordinary jurisprudence. Default & Doctrine — the title of this magazine — is exactly what Kalyani Transco v. Bhushan Power illustrates. The default happened in 2017. The doctrine, eight years on, is still being written.
Read next: The Twenty-Five Cases the Rest of IBC Sits On — the precedent backbone Kalyani Transco is fighting against.