Introduction
This post critically examines the Delhi High Court’s judgment in Directorate of Enforcement v. M/s Vikas WSP Ltd., which addressed whether the Supreme Court’s COVID-era extension orders applied to the 180-day limit for confirming Provisional Attachment Orders under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (“PMLA”) and the PML (Issuance of Provisional Attachment Order) Rules 2013. It proposes a test called the Crisis-Responsive Statutory Deadline Test (the “Test”) to guide when courts may justifiably extend statutory timelines during emergencies, to steady administrative feasibility with legislative intent, and most importantly, to protect procedural rights.
The Test works using two broad prongs: structural and normative. The structural prong examines deadline typology to test the feasibility of timelines, anchored in Justice P.N. Bhagwati’s account of procedural fairness and informed, in a narrower sense, by realist observations on judging associated with Richard Posner. The normative prong, informed by Ronald Dworkin’s rights-based reasoning and cases like Modern Dental College and Anuradha Bhasin, considers rights-weight and cause-of-delay. By probing the Delhi High Court’s verdict, this post develops the Test through structural and normative, and applies it to pandemic-era Provisional Attachment Orders extensions, showing how courts can lawfully, proportionally, and transparently toll statutory deadlines. Overall, the paper proposes four guiding questions, through three prongs, that the judiciary should ask before granting or refusing relief under suspended or extended statutory timelines.
Courts, Crises, and the Fate of Extensions
On September 24, 2025, the Delhi High Court (the “Court”) addressed whether the Supreme Court’s COVID-era limitation extensions applied to the 180-day limit for confirming Provisional Attachment Orders (“PAOs”) under the PMLA. The issue arose from an Enforcement Directorate (“ED”) appeal seeking to validate attachments and a writ by private parties challenging continued seizures. Under the PMLA, the Adjudicating Authority must confirm an attachment within 180 days, failing which it lapses. In this direction, the ED argued that Supreme Court extension orders covered judicial and quasi-judicial timelines and that actus curiae justified pausing the 180-day clock. Respondents said the 180-day limit was a statutory protection of property under Article 300A and not open to judicial extension. The Court sided with the ED, treating the Adjudicating Authority as quasi-judicial and upholding the extensions to prevent prejudice during systemic disruption.
Courts have varied in handling statutory timelines based on the subject, rights involved, and the statute’s purpose of balancing individual protections with effective enforcement. For personal liberty, the Supreme Court has resisted broad tolling; in S. Kasi v. State of U.P. it rejected pausing bail-related limits to prioritise life and liberty. Commercial and remedial timelines have seen more flexibility, as in Ghanashyam Mishra & Sons v. Edelweiss ARC, which extended CIRP and related arbitral limits. In hybrid areas mixing private rights and public interest, courts have split, with some upholding COVID-era extensions, showing the tension between statutory finality and maintaining enforcement during systemic disruption.
Across different areas of law, crises like COVID-19 expose two main gaps: deciding which deadlines can pause, and judging when delay is fair without straying from legislative purpose. The first prong classifies timelines as procedural, substantive, or mixed, pausing only the first two. Substantive limits such as the 180-day PAO period under the PMLA should stay firm. The second prong weighs rights and intent together – liberty under Article 21 remains fixed, property under Article 300A may allow short relief, and commercial interests permit limited extensions consistent with the statute’s purpose.st.
Arguing for a Test
Drawing on Justice P. N. Bhagwati’s insistence that procedure be fair and protective when life or liberty are at stake and Richard Posner’s realism about judging, it is argued that courts need typology to ascertain deadline (“Deadline Typology”) to replace the ad hoc pandemic practice of blanket extension orders. It requires reading the statutory phrase functionally and deciding whether the time limit merely permits action within a window, actually extinguishes a right, or contains both elements. If the provision is procedural, narrowly suspend filings, service, interim hearings, disclosure and other court-facing acts while courts are non-functional so parties do not lose their chance to be heard. Finding deadline typology is best assessed through these two questions,
(a) Does the statutory provision merely establish a procedural window for action, or does it impose a substantive cut-off that extinguishes a right or causes an order to lapse?
(b) If a provision has both procedural and substantive elements, can the procedural part be temporarily adjusted to allow delayed filings or alternate steps without altering the final deadline, and do the circumstances justify such a pause to preserve the law’s purpose?
Some root of this is also found in Indian procedural law. Rule 103 and Rule 104 of the NCLT Rules, 2016 assign responsibility to the Record Keeper and the registry for the preservation of records, verification of time stamps, and scrutiny of filings. The Allahabad High Court Rules (Rule 1) and the Supreme Court Rules (Rule 8) place similar duties on the Registrar Judicial to certify filings, check defects, and authenticate official logs. In Gaurav Rathi v SBI, the NCLAT treated the registry’s upload log as the authoritative record for determining whether delay was caused by the tribunal’s system rather than by the party. This may be used to define how courts rely on “strict contemporaneous proof”. It can also solve the problem of conflicting proof to some extent, as courts tend to prefer the log of the registry over the individual logs of the parties.
If the provision is substantive, as the 180-day PAO period under the PMLA, tolling should be rare and allowed only when the statute is silent on emergencies and necessity is clearly demonstrated. For hybrid provisions, the court should sever the procedural layer and grant relief only for that element, such as permitting adjourned filings in insolvency or tolling document submission in arbitration, while leaving the substantive cut-off intact. To avoid judicial severance from accidentally changing the scheme, the court pauses the procedural step together with the linked consequence, and only for the period shown in registry or NIC records. If pausing both would take the matter past a hard statutory outer limit, such as the IBC timeline or a statutory forfeiture point, the court treats the entire provision as substantive. This ensures the pause does not revive or extend rights that the statute intended to close. This approach may prevent temporary procedural fixes from becoming permanent changes to rights, and provides predictable, case-specific remedies across contexts including civil limitations, eviction notices, arbitration timelines, and regulatory deadlines.
Even after a court classifies a statutory timeline as procedural, substantive, or hybrid, it must still decide how far it may pause court-facing obligations without drifting into a revision of the legislative scheme. This pushes back against the view that emergencies automatically justify broad judicial flexibility by insisting on clearer limits on the scope of relief. Tarunabh Khaitan has noted, in the context of the Supreme Court’s COVID-19 tolling orders, that the Court risked assuming a quasi-executive role in such urgent situations. Comparative commentary in the United States similarly observes that emergency tolling orders can generate long-tail effects on how limitation periods are computed once normalcy resumes, sometimes producing outcomes that resemble ad hoc adjustments rather than straightforward statutory application. What is needed is a principled rule tying the legal character of the deadline to a shifting burden of proof and a clear standard of relief, so judges do not trade statutory design for administrative convenience.
An assessment of the weight of rights (“Rights-Weight”) and an analysis of cause for delays (“Cause-of-Delay”) is argued to provide that rule in detail. The first element would rank interests so the judge applies a variable standard: individual liberty is placed at the highest tier and remains presumptively non-tollable unless the statute expressly permits suspension; property and commercial rights may occupy a middle tier where limited, time-bound relief may be justified if it protects substantive rights without creating undue benefit for any party (Figure 1). Purely procedural acts may be ranked the lowest and be paused to prevent loss of hearing opportunities, subject to strict verification and prompt catch-up directions. This structure draws light inspiration from Dworkin’s rights-based reasoning, which treats rights as having inherent force rather than being adjustable for administrative reasons. A comparable logic appeared in Modern Dental College v. State of Madhya Pradesh, where the Supreme Court accepted restrictions only when proportionate and procedurally balanced, a view that supports allowing temporary procedural relief without altering the substance of rights. The claimant bears the burden of proof, which rises with the weight of the interest: minimal proof for low-tier procedural relief, strict contemporaneous proof for middle-tier adjustments, and a near-categorical bar for liberty-related deadlines saves express statutory language. (Figure 1)
The second element (Cause of Delay) would
demand that any delay be shown to come
from institutional or system failure by
contemporaneous and verifiable records. A
limited parallel can be found in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, where the Supreme Court required the State to justify restrictions through published, reviewable material instead of retrospective explanations. The same spirit applies here, though in a narrower form, to ensure that claims of delay rest on verifiable evidence such as official closure orders, registry logs, confirmed IT outage reports, lockdown directives, or third-party service confirmations, and not on after-the-fact affidavits. For hybrid provisions, the judge can separate layers and permit only procedural suspension when that can be done without nullifying the substantive cut-off. Care must be taken to mention that any relief granted should be provisional, narrowly tailored, and time-limited. It must always be accompanied by directions to restore lost processes and, where appropriate, to document the interruption for future audit. Requiring the same evidentiary discipline for tolling deadlines ensures that delay is assessed as an institutional fact, to assist such an inquiry, one may look at the two guiding questions.
- (a) Which specific legal interest will be lost or impaired if the deadline is not tolled, and where on the liberty–property–procedural scale does that interest sit?
(b) Did the delay arise from institutional or system failure supported by contemporaneous, verifiable evidence, or from party conduct?
Conclusion
In Directorate of Enforcement v. M/s Vikas WSP Ltd., the Delhi High Court examined whether the Supreme Court’s COVID-era extension orders could suspend the PMLA’s 180-day period for confirming Provisional Attachment Orders. Using the CRSD Test developed in this paper, the analysis concludes that the 180-day limit can be extended in genuine emergencies, but only where a brief pause does not change the statute’s substantive scheme and where the delay is tied to conditions that make timely compliance institutionally impossible.
The Test provides an actionable framework for courts. Judges should ask:
(a) whether the deadline is procedural or a substantive cut-off,
(b) whether any procedural element can be briefly adjusted without shifting the substantive end-point,
(c) Which specific legal interest will be lost or impaired if the deadline is not tolled, and where on the liberty–property–procedural scale does that interest sit?
(d) whether the delay stems from verified institutional failure, or from independent party conduct.
These inquiries enable courts to differentiate justified emergency-based modifications from deviations that may violate the core legislative purpose. They provide a principled roadmap for maintaining statutory structure and ultimately help ensure that emergencies are managed without letting the exception overtake the rule.
Author Bio – Uday Dabas is a third-year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at NLSIU, Bangalore, focusing on administrative law and money-laundering offences.
[Ed Note: This piece was edited by Arnav Mathur and published by Vedang Chouhan from the Student Editorial Team.]
