New Delhi: The Delhi High Court has set Monday, July 27, as the date to hear Vedanta Ltd's appeal against a single judge's order upholding the Centre's refusal to extend the production sharing contract (PSC) for the Suvali offshore block off Gujarat. The court declined to grant interim relief in the meantime, after being told that Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd (ONGC) has already assumed operations.
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A bench of Justices Dinesh Mehta and Rajneesh Kumar Gupta heard the matter. Attorney General R Venkataramani told the bench that ONGC took control following the order of July 22, a submission the court recorded.
Appearing for Vedanta, senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi and Jayant Mehta told the bench that the company has run the block without interruption since 1998, and asked for directions permitting it to remain as operator. The bench said it would take up arguments on Monday, but would not order possession restored at this stage, given that ONGC is itself a member of the PSC consortium.
Venkataramani resisted any interim order, submitting that returning operations to Vedanta did not arise.
Vedanta's position outside court differs from what the Attorney General told the bench. In a statement issued after the hearing, the company said: "Operations of the block have not been taken over by any party. It is status quo as the matter remains sub judice."
The appeal targets the single judge's dismissal of Vedanta's writ petition. That petition had challenged a direction of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas dated September 19, 2025, which turned down an application Vedanta had filed in 2021 seeking to extend the Suvali PSC.
The contract was executed on June 20, 1998 between the Centre, Vedanta, ONGC and Invenire Petrodyne Ltd. It carried an initial term of 25 years, running to 29 June 2023, with provision for extensions. Vedanta applied in June 2021 for a further 10 years. Five interim extensions followed, the last of which lapsed on September 29, 2024.
In upholding the government's refusal, the single judge pointed to what the order described as Vedanta's "unilateral" deductions from the government's share of proceeds. Those deductions were said to have been made either to set off excise liabilities or to preserve the company's economic benefits. The judge held this a permissible ground for declining an extension under the applicable policy.
Vedanta's case is that the refusal departs from the government's own 2017 extension policy and offends Article 14 of the Constitution. The company argues that the ministry weighed criteria that had no bearing on the question, and gave no weight to how such applications had been handled in the past or to the expectation of extension that practice had created.
The Centre has defended the refusal as taken in the public interest and in keeping with the Public Trust Doctrine.
The matter came up briefly earlier on Thursday before a bench headed by Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya. It was moved to the Mehta and Gupta bench after Justice Tejas Karia recused himself.
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An earlier interim order of the High Court, passed in January, had directed the parties to maintain status quo.
