Vidhara

The Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996

§39Lien on arbitral award and deposits as to costs

(1) Subject to the provisions of sub-section (2) and to any provision to the contrary in the arbitration agreement, the arbitral tribunal shall have a lien on the arbitral award for any unpaid costs of the arbitration. (2) If in any case an arbitral tribunal refuses to deliver its award except on payment of the costs demanded by it, the Court may, on an application in this behalf, order that the arbitral tribunal shall deliver the arbitral award to the applicant on payment into Court by the applicant of the costs demanded, and shall, after such inquiry, if any, as it thinks fit, further order that out of the money so paid into Court there shall be paid to the arbitral tribunal by way of costs such sum as the Court may consider reasonable and that the balance of the money, if any, shall be refunded to the applicant. (3) An application under sub-section (2) may be made by any party unless the fees demanded have been fixed by written agreement between him and the arbitral tribunal, and the arbitral tribunal shall be entitled to appear and be heard on any such application. (4) The Court may make such orders as it thinks fit respecting the costs of the arbitration where any question arises respecting such costs and the arbitral award contains no sufficient provision concerning them.

Share:WhatsAppTelegram

Source & version

Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (26 of 1996), English PDF (bitstream 123456789/1978/1/a199626.pdf, 690,365 bytes, sha256 a3b936d5…) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-07-30. The same handle also carries a Hindi edition (h199626.pdf) — the English 'a'-prefixed file is the one ingested. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history and the Schedules (First–Seventh, incl. the New York and Geneva Convention texts) excluded; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending.

How we verify this text →

Spotted a mistake in this text or its mapping? Report an issue with ARB §39

Was this page useful for your prep?

Feedback