SC Clarifies DRT’s Power to Restore Possession Under SARFAESI

The word that decides a Remedy: Supreme Court’s Reading of “Restore” in SARFAESI Section 17(3)

Summary: The article examines Central Bank of India and Anr. v. Smt. Prabha Jain and Ors., (2025) 4 SCC 38, decided on 9th January 2025, focusing on the distinction between civil-court jurisdiction under Section 9 CPC and DRT jurisdiction under Section 17 of the SARFAESI Act, particularly the meaning of “restore” in Section 17(3). The Supreme Court held that Section 34 does not bar a civil suit seeking declarations that a pre-existing sale deed and consequent mortgage are void where the dispute falls outside the DRT’s statutory jurisdiction. The Court also held that “restore” means returning possession to the position existing before the secured creditor’s measure and does not empower the DRT to hand over possession for the first time to a person who was never in possession. On the facts, the plaintiff, whose claim arose independently from the mortgagor’s title and who was never in possession, could pursue possession before the civil court. The article distinguishes Jagdish Singh v. Heeralal and discusses third-party dispossession, security-only sale deeds, the 2016 amendment to Section 17(3), and related situations involving trespassers, procedural non-compliance and self-help dispossession. Harshad Govardhan Sondagar v. International Assets Reconstruction Company Limited and Others.

Introduction

Few situations trouble the conscience of a tribunal quite like a secured creditor lawfully enforcing its security, only for the enforcement to fall on a person who was never the borrower, never consented to the mortgage, and never gave up possession of the property. The Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002 (“SARFAESI Act”) was designed for speed — recovery of secured debt without the delay of a civil trial. But speed and finality can, in the wrong hands, become instruments of a different kind of injustice: a fraudulent borrower who never had genuine title mortgages a property to a bank, the bank forecloses in good faith, and the real, innocent owner-occupier is thrown out of a home or a shop with no forum that seems willing to hear a full-blooded title dispute in time to save the property.

This is precisely the terrain the Supreme Court traversed in Central Bank of India and Anr. v. Smt. Prabha Jain and Ors., (2025) 4 SCC 38 decided on 9^th January 2025. The judgment is significant for two reasons. First, it restates, with unusual clarity, where the line falls between the plenary jurisdiction of the civil court under Section 9 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (“CPC”) and the statutorily confined jurisdiction of the Debts Recovery Tribunal (“DRT”) under Section 17 of the SARFAESI Act. Second, and more consequentially for practitioners, it undertakes a granular, almost lexicographic, analysis of a single word in Section 17(3) — “restore” — and in doing so, opens (and to an extent forecloses) an important avenue of relief for third parties caught in the crossfire of SARFAESI enforcement.

This article examines the judgment in detail, extracts its operative principles, and then turns to a recurring fact pattern seen in practice — the “security-only” sale deed used to defraud an elderly or unsophisticated owner — to test how far Prabha Jain actually carries a dispossessed third party. It closes with three further nuances the judgment does not directly address: what happens when the third party is not a defrauded owner but a rank trespasser; what happens when it is the secured creditor, not the borrower, who acts outside the bounds of law; and what happens when dispossession occurs through self-help rather than through the machinery of the Act at all.

The Statutory Scheme, in Brief

The relevant architecture of the SARFAESI Act can be summarised as follows:

Section 13(2): On classification of an account as a non-performing asset, the secured creditor issues a demand notice calling upon the borrower to discharge the liability within sixty days.

Section 13(4): On failure to comply, the secured creditor may take “measures” to recover the debt, including taking possession of the secured asset.

Section 14: Where physical possession cannot be taken peacefully, the secured creditor may approach the Chief Judicial Magistrate or District Magistrate for assistance in taking possession.

Section 17: “Any person (including the borrower)” aggrieved by a measure taken under Section 13(4) may apply to the DRT. Sub-section (3) empowers the DRT, if it finds the measure invalid, to “restore” possession of the secured asset.

Section 34: Ousts the jurisdiction of the civil court in respect of any matter which the DRT or the Appellate Tribunal is empowered to determine under the Act.

It is Section 34, read with the borrower-centric language historically attributed to Section 17(3), that secured creditors have long deployed to resist civil suits filed by third parties — arguing that any grievance touching the secured asset must be agitated, if at all, before the DRT, and that the DRT’s remedies are in any event confined to the borrower.

The Recurring Fact Pattern: The “Security-Only” Sale Deed

A pattern familiar to practitioners handling SARFAESI litigation runs roughly as follows. An owner, often elderly or otherwise unable to access institutional credit, requires a relatively modest sum for a pressing personal need — medical treatment, a child’s education, or the like. Unable to obtain a bank loan, the owner turns to a private lender. The lender agrees to advance the sum, but insists on “security,” and rather than taking a mortgage, insists on an outright, registered sale deed — representing to the owner, often only orally, that the deed is merely a formality, that possession will remain with the owner, and that a reconveyance will follow on repayment.

The owner, trusting the lender and in urgent need of funds, executes the deed. Possession is never disturbed. Sometime later, without the owner’s knowledge, the lender uses the very deed to raise a substantially larger credit facility from a bank or NBFC, mortgaging the property as if it were genuinely and beneficially his own. The lender then defaults. The bank, unaware of (or on the third party’s case, wilfully blind to) the true state of possession, proceeds under Sections 13(2), 13(4) and, where necessary, Section 14, and ultimately dispossesses the very owner who never sold the property in any real sense.

Two features of this pattern recur often enough to be worth flagging for any practitioner testing whether a given fact situation fits the mould:

A. Gross undervaluation. The amount actually advanced to the owner is frequently a fraction — sometimes as little as a fifth or a sixth — of the property’s genuine market value, while the sale deed itself typically recites a consideration pegged to the government guideline (circle-rate/jantri) value rather than any negotiated price. That gap is itself powerful circumstantial evidence that the transaction was never a bona fide sale.

B. Procedural isolation of the true owner. The defaulting borrower, having full knowledge that a third party remains in possession, frequently litigates the SARFAESI action in his own name — filing his own Section 17 application, or entering into a settlement with the bank — without ever impleading, or even informing, the person actually in occupation. By the time the third party learns of the proceedings, possession may already have changed hands.

Whether such a third party can compel the DRT to restore possession — as opposed to being relegated entirely to a civil suit that may take years to conclude, by which time the property may already be auctioned — is exactly the question Prabha Jain answers, and the answer is more nuanced than either side’s opening position usually suggests.

Central Bank of India v. Prabha Jain: Facts and Procedural History

The appeal before the Supreme Court arose from a suit filed by the widow of one of three co-owners of a parcel of land inherited from her father-in-law. On her case, her brother-in-law, without effecting any partition among the heirs, purported to sell portions of the jointly-held land to third parties, one of whom mortgaged a plot with Central Bank of India to obtain a loan. On default, the bank initiated SARFAESI proceedings. The plaintiff, asserting that the sale deed and the consequent mortgage were both a nullity as against her undivided share, filed a civil suit seeking three reliefs: a declaration that the sale deed executed by her brother-in-law was illegal; a declaration that the consequent mortgage in the bank’s favour was illegal; and possession of the suit property.

The bank applied under Order VII Rule 11 CPC for rejection of the plaint, contending that the civil court’s jurisdiction was ousted by Section 34 of the SARFAESI Act. The trial court accepted this and rejected the plaint. The High Court, in first appeal, restored the suit, holding that the DRT had no jurisdiction to decide the validity of a sale deed or mortgage, and that the civil court’s jurisdiction to decide such questions of title was accordingly not ousted. The bank carried the matter to the Supreme Court.

The Two Questions Before the Court

The Supreme Court framed its inquiry around two related but distinct questions:

A. First, does Section 34 of the SARFAESI Act bar a civil suit seeking a declaration that a sale deed and a consequent mortgage are void, at the instance of a person who is neither the borrower nor a person claiming through the borrower?

B. Second, independent of the first question, could the plaintiff, in any event, have sought the relief of possession from the DRT itself under Section 17(3) — such that her third relief, at least, would have been barred?

The Court’s treatment of the second question is the more significant contribution of the case, and is examined in detail in Part VI below. Its treatment of the first question is best understood through the comparative table that follows.

Civil Court v. DRT: Where the Line Falls

The Court’s reasoning on Section 34 proceeds from first principles. Section 34 ousts civil court jurisdiction only “in respect of any matter which a Debts Recovery Tribunal… is empowered by or under this Act to determine.” The bar is therefore coextensive with the DRT’s own jurisdiction — no wider. Since Section 17 confines the DRT’s jurisdiction to examining whether “measures” taken by the secured creditor under Section 13(4) are in accordance with the Act, any dispute that lies outside that inquiry — most importantly, a dispute over the validity of a sale deed or mortgage deed executed before, and independently of, the secured creditor’s own action — falls squarely within the exclusive domain of the civil court under Section 9 CPC. The DRT, being a creature of statute, cannot be read as impliedly possessing a power to finally determine title that the statute nowhere confers upon it.

The Court offered two illustrations that are worth restating (in substance) because they crystallise the principle rather better than any abstract formulation: where two siblings each rely on a different, mutually inconsistent will to claim exclusive title to a parcel of land, and one mortgages it to a bank, the resulting SARFAESI action cannot possibly require the DRT to decide which will is genuine — that is inescapably a matter for the civil court. Equally, where an adopted child’s very status as heir is disputed by a collateral relative, and the child mortgages inherited property, the validity of the adoption — on which the mortgage’s own validity depends — is not a question SARFAESI machinery was ever built to resolve.

On this analysis, the Court upheld the High Court’s view that the plaintiff’s first two reliefs — declarations invalidating the sale deed and the mortgage — were not barred by Section 34 and lay properly before the civil court. The appeal therefore failed on this limb, and the civil suit was permitted to proceed to trial on the question of title.

The Word “Restore”: The Heart of the Judgment

It is the Court’s treatment of the third relief — possession — that carries the greatest practical weight for future litigation, because it is here that the Court had to decide whether the plaintiff’s suit for possession was itself barred by Section 34, on the footing that she could have sought that very relief from the DRT under Section 17(3).

Section 17(3), as it stood prior to the 2016 amendment (and materially unchanged in substance thereafter), empowers the DRT, on finding that the secured creditor’s measures were not in accordance with the Act, to “restore the possession of the secured assets… to the borrower.” The 2016 amendment inserted the words “or such other aggrieved person” after “borrower,” widening the class of persons to whom possession may be restored, but — and this is the crux of the Court’s analysis — without touching the operative verb.

The Dictionary as Doctrine

The Court’s reasoning is notable for resting, quite deliberately, on ordinary dictionary meaning. It observed that Parliament’s choice of the word “restore”, and not “hand over”, was neither accidental nor stylistic. Relying on the Cambridge English Dictionary’s definition of “restore” as “to return something or someone to an earlier good condition or position,” the Court held that the DRT’s power under Section 17(3) is a power to return possession to whoever held it immediately before the secured creditor’s measure disturbed it — and nothing more. The DRT, on this reading, has no power to hand over possession, for the first time, to a person who was never in possession when the bank stepped in, however strong that person’s claim to title might otherwise be.

The Court explained the underlying policy rationale candidly: it is one thing for Parliament to empower the DRT to find that a secured creditor’s measures were unlawful and to direct that the property be restored to the position it was in before those measures — essentially, an undoing of the secured creditor’s own wrongful act. It would be a different, and in the Court’s words illogical, thing altogether for Parliament to have empowered the DRT to instead direct the secured creditor to hand over possession to some third party who was never in possession in the first place, effectively using SARFAESI machinery to adjudicate and enforce a freestanding title claim that has nothing to do with the measure under challenge.

Applying This to the Facts

On the facts before it, the Court held that the plaintiff could not have sought the relief of possession from the DRT, for two independent reasons. First, she was neither the borrower nor a person claiming under or through the borrower; her claim to the land was independent of, and adverse to, the mortgagor’s own chain of title — a freestanding inheritance dispute, not a claim connected to the mortgage transaction at all. Second, and more fundamentally, she was simply never in possession of the suit property at any point in time; the question of the DRT “restoring” possession to her therefore never arose on the facts, whatever the legal position might otherwise have been. Since her possession relief could not have been granted by the DRT in any event, it followed that Section 34 posed no bar to her seeking that very relief before the civil court instead.

It is worth pausing on what the Court did not say. It did not hold that a third party can never obtain restoration of possession from the DRT. Quite the contrary — the judgment repeatedly signals that where a person, even one “claiming through the borrower” or holding possession on the borrower’s behalf, is factually dispossessed by the secured creditor’s own measure, Section 17(3) is precisely the provision designed to undo that. The Court’s denial of relief turned entirely on the plaintiff’s failure to satisfy the threshold factual condition — prior possession — not on any categorical rule that only the named borrower may benefit from restoration.

Distinguishing Jagdish Singh

The judgment is equally significant for what it does to an earlier decision, Jagdish Singh v. Heeralal (2014) 1 SCC 479, which had been read by several High Courts as authority for the broader proposition that the DRT’s jurisdiction under Section 17 forecloses civil suits by any person affected by a Section 13(4) measure, including persons asserting independent title disputes such as partition claims. The Court in Prabha Jain held that Jagdish Singh, while correctly recognising that the phrase “any person” in Section 17(1) is of wide import, overlooked the word “restore” in Section 17(3) and consequently failed to appreciate that the DRT’s wide standing to entertain an application does not translate into an equally wide power to grant every relief a wide class of applicants might seek. Because Jagdish Singh contained no finding that the DRT actually had jurisdiction to grant the relief of partition sought in that case, the Court held it could not be treated as a precedent on that specific point at all — a fairly unusual, and telling, form of appellate housekeeping.

For practitioners, the practical upshot is that decisions following the broader, undifferentiated reading of Jagdish Singh — including on facts resembling partition or co-ownership disputes — must now be read subject to Prabha Jain’s clarification, and cited with that caveat squarely acknowledged.

Testing the Principle Against the “Security-Only” Fact Pattern

Returning to the recurring pattern described in Part II, it is worth working through, as a hypothetical exercise, how Prabha Jain’s reasoning would likely apply to a defrauded owner-occupier in that mould — as distinct from the freestanding inheritance dispute actually before the Supreme Court.

A. Possession, not merely title, is the threshold fact. Unlike the plaintiff in Prabha Jain, a defrauded owner in this pattern typically remains in continuous, open, physical possession of the property right up to the moment the secured creditor’s authorised officer executes the Section 13(4)/Section 14 measure. On Prabha Jain’s own logic, this is precisely the person Section 17(3) empowers the DRT to restore — someone who was in possession “when the bank took over possession,” to use the Court’s own formulation, and from whom that possession was factually taken by the impugned measure.

B. The claim is not “adverse to the borrower” in the Prabha Jain sense. The plaintiff in Prabha Jain lost because her claim to the land was a freestanding one, wholly disconnected from the mortgagor’s chain of title — she was, in effect, a stranger to the mortgage transaction asserting a separate inheritance right. A defrauded owner in the security-only pattern is differently placed: the very premise of the claim is that the borrower never validly held the title he purported to mortgage in the first place, because the deed relied upon was itself procured by misrepresentation and was never intended, or understood by either party, to transfer beneficial ownership or possession. This is not an adverse, freestanding claim of the kind Prabha Jain declined to protect — it goes to the root of whether any valid mortgage came into existence at all.

C. Title still cannot be finally decided by the DRT. Prabha Jain’s jurisdictional bifurcation applies with full force here. The DRT cannot itself declare the sale deed void, forged, or a nullity — that remains the civil court’s exclusive preserve. A third party in this position must, as a matter of prudence, pursue a civil suit for that declaration in parallel, while confining the DRT application strictly to the incidental, fact-based question of possession: who held it, when it was disturbed, and whether the measure that disturbed it complied with the Act.

D. Suppression before the Magistrate is a distinct, additional ground. Where the secured creditor knew, or ought to have known, that a person other than the borrower was in settled possession, and nonetheless obtained an order under Section 14 without disclosing that fact to the Magistrate, the resulting order — and the physical dispossession carried out under it — is vulnerable to challenge on ordinary principles of suppression of material facts, entirely independent of the restore/hand-over analysis. This ground, properly pleaded, can strengthen a third party’s case for interim protection even before the merits of the fraud allegation are fully tried.

None of this guarantees an outcome; Prabha Jain leaves the DRT free (indeed, bound) to examine the facts, and a bank or borrower may well dispute that possession was genuinely with the third party, or that the deed was genuinely nominal. But it does mean the door Prabha Jain left open for a factual possessor is a real one, and considerably more promising than a superficial reading of the “no hand-over” language might suggest to a party encountering the judgment for the first time.

Three Further Nuances Prabha Jain Does Not Directly Resolve

The Rank Trespasser: Does “Restore” Protect Unlawful Occupation?

Consider a materially different hypothetical: rather than a defrauded owner induced into executing a nominal security deed, the person dispossessed is a rank trespasser or encroacher — someone with no colour of title whatsoever, no permissive occupation from the borrower or anyone else, and no claim beyond bare, unauthorised physical occupation, perhaps taken shortly before or even after the mortgage was created. Can such a person invoke Section 17(3) and demand restoration on the strength of Prabha Jain’s possession-centric reading?

The better view is that they cannot, for at least three reasons. First, Section 17(1) confines standing to a person “aggrieved” by the secured creditor’s measure. “Aggrieved” imports a legally cognizable interest or grievance; a trespasser’s bare physical occupation, unsupported by any right, permission, or colour of title, is not the kind of interest the Act contemplates protecting, and courts have generally been reluctant to treat mere unlawful occupation as conferring standing to invoke a statutory possessory remedy of this kind. Second, Prabha Jain’s own reasoning is explicitly anchored in restoring a status quo ante that the secured creditor’s measure wrongfully disturbed; where the occupant’s presence was itself unlawful from its inception, there is no lawful “earlier good position” for the DRT to restore the person to, in the dictionary sense the Court itself invoked. Third, allowing trespassers to invoke Section 17(3) would create an obvious moral hazard, incentivising encroachment on mortgaged property as a tactic to frustrate or delay lawful enforcement — an outcome plainly at odds with the Act’s stated purpose of speedy recovery.

That said, a genuine grey zone exists between the rank trespasser and the defrauded owner: a licensee, a tenant holding over, a family member in long-standing permissive occupation, or a person with an inchoate or unperfected claim (for instance, an as-yet-unperfected adverse possession claim, or an heir whose share has not been formally partitioned). The 2016 insertion of “or such other aggrieved person” into Section 17(3) — a legislative response to the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling in Harshad Govardhan Sondagar v. International Assets Reconstruction Co. Ltd. (2014) 6 SCC 1, which had held that a tenant could not approach the DRT because restoration could only be ordered in favour of the borrower — signals that Parliament intended the restorative power to extend meaningfully beyond the named borrower. Where precisely the line falls between a protected “other aggrieved person” and an unprotected trespasser is likely to be the next major interpretive battleground in this area of law, and will probably turn on whether the occupant’s possession has some independent, legally recognisable root, however modest, as opposed to being bare and unauthorised.

When the Secured Creditor Itself Bypasses Due Process

A second, quite different scenario arises where it is not the occupant’s title that is in question, but the lawfulness of the secured creditor’s own conduct in taking possession. The Act contemplates a structured process: symbolic possession under Section 13(4), and, where physical possession cannot be taken peacefully, recourse to the Chief Judicial Magistrate or District Magistrate under Section 14, whose assistance is itself governed by procedural safeguards. Where a secured creditor bypasses this process altogether — taking physical possession by force, through private musclemen, without any Section 14 order, or in excess of what a Section 14 order actually authorised — the resulting dispossession is unlawful not because of any infirmity in the occupant’s title, but because the “measure” itself was never validly taken under the Act at all.

This distinction matters because it changes the analytical starting point. Restoration in such a case does not depend on first establishing that the occupant enjoys some special, protected category of possession under the restore/hand-over framework; it follows more directly from the illegality of the measure itself, which the DRT is squarely empowered under Section 17(2) and (3) to examine and, if invalid, undo. A secured creditor’s suppression of material facts before the Magistrate — for instance, concealing that a third party, and not the borrower, was in occupation — falls into a related but analytically distinct category: the order obtained from the Magistrate is itself vitiated for want of candour, independent of whether the occupant ultimately succeeds in establishing a title-based entitlement to restoration under the Prabha Jain framework. A well-drafted Section 17 application arising from such facts should, as a matter of pleading strategy, run both arguments in parallel rather than conflating them.

Self-Help Dispossession Outside the Act Altogether

A third scenario, easily overlooked, arises where the dispossession is carried out not by the secured creditor at all, but by the defaulting borrower or a third party acting on the borrower’s behalf — for instance, a borrower who, sensing that foreclosure is imminent, forcibly evicts a family member, tenant, or other occupant in physical possession, in order to hand over a vacant property to the bank and thereby deflect any future third-party claim. Since no “measure” under Section 13(4) is involved in such an eviction — it is private, extra-statutory self-help by the borrower, not action by the secured creditor — Section 17 arguably has no application at all, and the DRT’s restorative jurisdiction under Section 17(3) is simply not engaged on these facts.

The occupant’s remedy in such a case lies outside the SARFAESI framework entirely: an ordinary suit for possession and injunction under the general law, or, where the dispossession is recent, the summary remedy under Section 6 of the Specific Relief Act, 1963, which protects a person in settled possession against forcible dispossession otherwise than in due course of law, regardless of whether that person can ultimately prove title — provided the suit is filed within six months of the dispossession. Practitioners encountering a forcible-eviction fact pattern should resist the temptation to shoehorn it into a Section 17 application merely because a SARFAESI proceeding happens to be pending in the background; where the eviction was not itself a measure taken by the secured creditor, the correct forum is the civil court, and pursued promptly.

Practical Guidance for Practitioners

Drawing the threads together, a practitioner assessing a third-party dispossession fact pattern in the aftermath of Prabha Jain would do well to work through the following sequence:

A. Establish, with documentary and independent corroboration, that the client was in actual physical possession immediately before the secured creditor’s Section 13(4)/Section 14 measure — this is the threshold Prabha Jain treats as determinative.

B. Frame the Section 17 application as one seeking restoration to a prior factual position, not as a request to “hand over” possession for the first time — the choice of language in the pleadings is not cosmetic; it tracks the very distinction the Supreme Court drew.

C. Keep the title dispute in the civil court. Do not ask the DRT to declare a sale deed void or a nullity; confine that relief to a properly instituted civil suit, and use the DRT application only for the incidental, possession-focused inquiry.

D. Plead suppression separately and specifically, wherever the secured creditor knew or ought to have known that a third party, and not the borrower, was in occupation, and failed to disclose this before the Magistrate under Section 14.

E. Scrutinise the borrower’s own conduct in parallel proceedings — where the borrower has filed his own Section 17 application, or entered into a settlement with the bank, without impleading or informing the occupying third party, this is significant circumstantial material bearing on both the genuineness of the underlying transaction and the good faith of the parties opposing restoration.

F. Test the fact pattern against the trespasser/due-process/self-help variants discussed above before assuming Section 17(3) is even the right provision to invoke — a wrong choice of forum can waste the very time that matters most in a SARFAESI timeline.

Conclusion

Central Bank of India v. Smt. Prabha Jain performs a careful balancing act. It refuses to let the SARFAESI Act’s undoubted efficiency as a debt-recovery mechanism metastasise into a jurisdiction to finally settle contested questions of title — that function remains, as it should, with the civil court. At the same time, by anchoring the DRT’s power under Section 17(3) in the ordinary meaning of “restore”, the Court declines to strip the DRT of a meaningful, immediate remedy for the person who was actually disturbed in possession by the secured creditor’s own action, whether or not that person happens to be the named borrower.

For the defrauded owner caught in a security-only sale deed, the judgment is, on balance, a favourable one — provided the case is pleaded with precision: possession established as a threshold fact, title relief kept firmly within the civil court’s domain, and any suppression before the Magistrate raised as a distinct, additional ground. For the rank trespasser, the judgment offers little comfort, and rightly so. And for the borrower who resorts to force outside the Act altogether, or the secured creditor who cuts procedural corners, the remedies lie along paths Prabha Jain does not itself chart, but which its underlying logic — fidelity to the statute’s actual words, and a refusal to let form triumph over the substance of who was wrongfully dispossessed — helps illuminate all the same.

Cases Discussed

• Central Bank of India and Anr. v. Smt. Prabha Jain and Ors. (Supreme Court of India), (2025) 4 SCC 38 decided on 9th January 2025
• Jagdish Singh v. Heeralal (Supreme Court of India), (2014) 1 SCC 479
• Harshad Govardhan Sondagar v. International Assets Reconstruction Company Limited (Supreme Court of India), (2014) 6 SCC 1 Harshad Govardhan Sondagar v. International Assets Reconstruction Company Limited

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Disclaimer: This article is based on the reported decision in Central Bank of India and Anr. v. Smt. Prabha Jain and Ors., (2025) ibclaw.in 27 SC, Civil Appeal No. 1876 of 2016 with connected appeals, decided by the Supreme Court of India on 9 January 2025. It does not refer to, rely upon, or draw from the facts of any specific pending litigation, and any factual illustrations used in this article are hypothetical, offered only to test the principles discussed. Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice, and readers should seek independent professional advice on the facts of any particular matter before acting on any view expressed herein. The views expressed are personal.

Author Profile: Mihirkumar V. Patel is an independent Advocate practicing before the High Court of Gujarat, Debts Recovery Tribunal-1 and 2 at Ahmedabad, Debts Recovery Appellate Tribunal at Mumbai, and the City Civil Court at Ahmedabad. He specializes in Writ Petitions (Article 226), Direct and Indirect Tax Litigation, Commercial Litigation, Land disputes, RERA, Banking, SARFAESI Act, RDB Act, and Recovery Disputes.