The Right Forum, the Wrong Rule: Delhi’s Rs 10 Crores Proposal Needs an IP Carve-Out

An analysis of Delhi’s proposed increase in District Courts’ pecuniary jurisdiction from Rs 2 crores to Rs 10 crores, arguing that the reform should include a targeted intellectual property carve-out to avoid unnecessary transfers and preserve the Delhi High Court’s specialised role in patent and design validity disputes.

Introduction

Between 14 July 2026 and 16 July 2026, advocates practising before the Delhi High Court abstained from judicial work over the Full Court’s recommendation to increase the pecuniary jurisdiction of Delhi’s District Courts from Rs 2 crores to Rs 10 crores.¹ The abstention was suspended after representatives of the Delhi High Court Bar Association met the Union Law Minister and received an assurance that their objections would be considered. The recommendation, however, remains alive.

The proposal is not inherently unsound. Delhi’s present limit directs even local property disputes to the High Court once their valuation crosses Rs 2 crores, and rising property values have made that increasingly common. Sending more ordinary civil suits to Delhi’s eleven judicial districts may reduce cost and bring trial courts closer to litigants. But a uniform Rs 10 crores rule would interact badly with intellectual-property statutes that already divide infringement and validity jurisdiction between District Courts and the High Court. Parliament should therefore adopt the increase only with a targeted intellectual property (IP) carve-out. The case for that exception is institutional, not an assertion that District Judges are incapable of deciding complex disputes.

A recommendation, not a change in law

Section 5(2), Delhi High Court Act, 1966 presently confers ordinary original civil jurisdiction on the High Court in suits valued above Rs 2 crores. The Full Court cannot change that figure by administrative resolution. In Delhi High Court Bar Assn. v. High Court of Delhi², the Division Bench’s order of 10 July 2026 refused to stop the Judges’ Committee from placing its report before the Full Court. It nevertheless recorded that the report was consultative and that only Parliament could amend the Act.

That procedural posture matters. The court was deciding applications for interim relief and repeatedly described its conclusions as prima facie. It did not finally reject every possible challenge to the eventual legislation. Nor does Rutu Mihir Panchal v. Union of India³, which upheld the consumer commissions’ jurisdictional classification based on consideration paid, make every monetary allocation immune from Article 14. It establishes the narrower point that the legislature has considerable latitude to select a rational criterion for distributing cases between competent forums.

The same realism should govern this debate. Pecuniary jurisdiction under general law and specialised legislation is not divided into two hermetically sealed regimes. Both are legislative choices about forum and capacity. Commercial Courts under the Commercial Courts Act, 2015 remain part of the ordinary judiciary and apply the Civil Procedure Code, 1908 as modified by that Act; since 2018, the statutory floor for a commercial dispute of “specified value” has been Rs 3 lakhs.⁴ The question is therefore not whether special law is categorically different, but whether a proposed monetary rule coheres with the jurisdictional design of the statutes it will affect.

Why intellectual property is different

That coherence problem is clearest in patent litigation. Section 104, Patents Act, 1970 permits an infringement suit to begin before a District Court, but requires the suit and counterclaim to be transferred to the High Court if the defendant counterclaims for revocation.⁵ A defendant may instead raise invalidity merely as a defence under Section 107, in which event the District Court can decide the defence without revoking the patent.

The distinction was confirmed on 24 February 2026 in Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GMBH & Co. KG v. Controller of Patents⁶, the Division Bench appeal arising from the Macleods litigation. The court held that a successful Section 107 defence operates in personam and defeats the infringement action, whereas revocation under Section 64 operates in rem and removes the patent from the register.⁷ The two remedies operate in different spheres; one does not extinguish the other.

The implication for the proposed threshold is practical. Patent suits valued between Rs 2 crores and Rs 10 crores would begin in a District Commercial Court. Some would remain there because the defendant relies only on Section 107. Others would return to the High Court once revocation is sought by counterclaim. A revocation counterclaim is not inevitable and should not be described as routine without evidence. Yet where revocation is genuinely required, the proposed reform creates a District Court filing followed by a statutorily compelled transfer — the very procedural detour that docket reform ought to eliminate.

Design law makes the problem sharper. Under Section 22(4), Designs Act, 2000, once a ground on which the registration may be cancelled is raised as a defence in a District Court infringement proceeding, the proceeding must be transferred to the High Court. The Commercial Courts Act itself anticipates both routes: The second proviso to Section 7 directs patent matters transferred under Section 104 and design matters transferred under Section 22(4) to the High Court’s commercial division.⁸ Parliament has therefore already treated High Court determination of these validity disputes as part of the statutory architecture, not an accidental feature of Delhi practice.

Specialisation without constitutional exaggeration

The abolition of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board and the creation of the Delhi High Court’s Intellectual Property Division reinforce the policy case for concentration, but they do not constitutionalise it.⁹ District Commercial Courts already hear lower-value IP suits, while appeals from the intellectual property offices, revocation proceedings and qualifying original suits lie before the High Court. Increasing the pecuniary limit would deepen that existing division; it would not create it for the first time.

For the same reason, the National Tax Tribunal line of authority is not a sound constitutional shortcut.¹⁰ Those cases concern the replacement of High Courts by tribunals whose composition and independence were disputed. Delhi’s District Judges are members of the regular judiciary under the High Court’s control under Article 235.¹¹ No litigant has a fundamental right to a High Court trial merely because a case is technically difficult or commercially valuable.

The better argument is one of system design. The Delhi High Court Intellectual Property Rights Division Rules, 2022 (IPD Rules), specialist roster, and the consolidated original, appellate, and writ work allow recurring questions of validity and enforcement to develop coherently.¹² Sending a larger band of infringement suits to District Courts while keeping revocation and registry appeals in the High Court increases the possibility of parallel proceedings, transfers and inconsistent timetables. That cost must be weighed against the access benefits of decentralisation rather than disguised as a question of judicial rank.

A narrower and workable solution

Delhi need not choose between retaining the Rs 2 crores limit for every suit and transferring every suit below Rs 10 crores. Mumbai supplies a workable legislative model. The Bombay City Civil Court Act, 1948 now gives the City Civil Court jurisdiction up to Rs 10 crores, but Section 3(c-2) expressly excludes “intellectual property matters”, defined to include trade marks, copyright, patents, designs, geographical indications, plant varieties and semiconductor layout-designs.¹³ The monetary limit was raised without mechanically dispersing a field for which the legislature preferred concentration in the High Court.

Parliament could enact the same broad exception for Delhi. If that is considered excessive, it could adopt a narrower carve-out preserving the Delhi High Court’s original jurisdiction over patent and design infringement suits — the two fields in which validity pleas trigger express statutory transfers. Trade mark and copyright suits could continue to follow the revised pecuniary rule. Either approach would be more coherent than requiring cases to start below and travel upward when the pleadings reveal a validity dispute.

The amendment should also protect part-heard cases from automatic transfer and require a review after three years using filing, disposal and transfer data from both levels. That would allow Parliament to test whether the new ceiling actually improves time and cost rather than assuming that redistribution alone produces efficiency.

Conclusion

The constitutional question is the easiest part of the controversy. The Full Court may recommend; Parliament must decide; and Parliament has broad authority to reallocate original civil work. The harder question is whether one monetary rule should govern every subject despite statutes that allocate validity disputes differently.

For ordinary civil suits, Rs 10 crores is a defensible response to Delhi’s property values, judicial geography and cost of access. For patent and design litigation, an undifferentiated increase would create foreseeable transfers and further divide work already organised around the High Court’s IPD. The right reform is therefore not to abandon enhancement, but to legislate it carefully: raise the general ceiling, preserve a principled IP exception, and measure the results. Delhi can bring ordinary justice closer to litigants without making specialised litigation take the long way back to the High Court.