The Supreme Court has drawn a hard line on cheque dishonour cases, ruling that if the demand notice does not exactly reflect the cheque amount, the entire complaint collapses — no excuses, not even a “typing mistake.”
A bench led by Chief Justice BR Gavai with Justice NV Anjaria made it crystal clear: the statutory demand notice under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act isn’t a place for approximations or clerical slip-ups. The amount in the notice must mirror the cheque amount — nothing more, nothing less.
“The law demands precision,” the Court stressed, holding that any deviation — whether inflating the figure, reducing it, or omitting it altogether — renders the notice void. Even if the cheque’s number and date are correctly mentioned, a mismatch in the figure itself makes the notice legally useless.
This ruling came in an appeal from a Delhi High Court order that had already thrown out a complaint on these grounds. In that case, the cheque was for ₹1 lakh, but the demand notice sought ₹2 lakh. The complainant pleaded it was just a typo. The Supreme Court was unmoved: even a typographical error, it said, fatally undermines the validity of the notice.
Quoting earlier precedents, including Suman Sethi v. Ajay K. Churiwal and Rahul Builders v. Arihant Fertilizers, the judgment reaffirmed that the demand must be strictly for the cheque amount. Claims for interest or costs may be stated separately, but they cannot bleed into the cheque figure itself.
Applying this to the case at hand (Kaveri Plastics v. Mahdoom Bawa Bahruden Noorul), the bench said: “The defence of inadvertence fails. A different figure in the notice introduces ambiguity about the ‘said amount,’ making the notice invalid in law. The High Court’s decision to quash the complaint was proper and legal.”
With this, the Supreme Court has once again reminded litigants: in cheque bounce cases, precision is not optional — it’s the very backbone of the law.