Vidhara

The Indian Contract Act, 1872

§137Creditor’s forbearance to sue does not discharge surety

Mere forbearance on the part of the creditor to sue the principal debtor or to enforce any other remedy against him does not, in the absence of any provision in the guarantee to the contrary, discharge the surety. Illustration B owes to C a debt guaranteed by A. The debt becomes payable. C does not sue B for a year after the debt has become payable. A is not discharged from his suretyship.

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Source & version

Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Indian Contract Act, 1872 (9 of 1872), English PDF (bitstream 123456789/2187/2/A187209.pdf, 568,075 bytes) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-07-16. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; illustrations restored via illustration-aware re-extraction on 2026-07-19; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Sections 2-3 repaired 2026-07-25 by re-extraction from the same source PDF (568,075 bytes, sha256 d756d45a…): a page-10 footnote block had been absorbed into s.2, splitting definitions (b)-(j) into s.3 and leaving s.3's own provision missing (D-027).

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