Return to sender: The misuse of remand orders by appellate tribunals

Appellate tribunals were established to ensure speedy and expert adjudication of appeals from regulators’ orders. However, tribunals in India frequently remand matters to regulators, resulting in prolonged delays and undermining regulatory certainty. This paper provides introductory overviews of the Securities Appellate Tribunal (sat) and the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (aptel) and analyses orders issued by these tribunals in 2024. We find that 13/228 sat orders (5.7%) and 28/171 aptel orders (16.4%) direct remands. We also evaluate whether these remands are consistent with recognised legal principles regarding when a remand may be ordered. In the absence of specific rules governing when tribunals can remand matters, we rely on the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (cpc) and judicial decisions to determine the limits of tribunals’ powers of remand. We classify reasons in the cpc and judicial decisions as “Permissible Reasons†, and all others as “Other Reasons†and find that several remands by both tribunals are for Other Reasons. Such remands increase costs, create uncertainty, and defeat the purpose for which tribunals were established. We suggest that clear limits on tribunals’ power to remand, similar to those on courts’ remands powers, should be codified in parent statutes and made uniformly applicable across tribunals.