The Supreme Court of India has drawn a firm line on how long a successful litigant can wait before seeking to enforce a mandatory injunction. If a decree orders performance but does not spell out when it must be carried out, the countdown for execution begins from the date the decree is passed — and it runs for three years.
A Bench comprising Justices Manoj Misra and Manmohan was examining a dispute where a mandatory injunction had been granted by a First Appellate Court in January 2005. The order, however, was silent on any specific timeline for compliance.
Years later, in August 2010, the decree-holders approached the executing court to enforce the injunction. The attempt fell flat. The executing court ruled that the plea was time-barred, pointing to Article 135 of the Schedule to the Limitation Act, 1963, which prescribes a three-year limitation period for enforcing a decree granting a mandatory injunction. The period begins either from the date fixed for performance — if one exists — or from the date of the decree itself.
With no date mentioned in the original order, the court treated the decree date as the trigger point. Since more than three years had passed, the execution application was dismissed.
The matter travelled upward but met the same fate. The Supreme Court declined to disturb the concurrent findings. It underscored that in the absence of a specified performance date, the statutory clock starts ticking from the decree’s pronouncement. Waiting beyond three years to seek enforcement leaves the decree-holder without a remedy.
The Court made it clear that the execution petition in question was confined solely to enforcing the mandatory injunction portion of the decree — and having been filed out of time, it could not be entertained.
The petition was dismissed, reinforcing a simple but decisive principle: when a decree is silent on timing, the law is not.
