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On April 2, a bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe delivered a judgment in M/s A.K.G. Construction and Developers Pvt. Ltd. v. State of Jharkhand that may be the most consequential statement on the law of blacklisting in recent years. The judgment upheld the termination of a construction contract but struck down the accompanying blacklisting order. Its reasoning rests on a proposition at once elementary and, in the present institutional climate, pointed: that blacklisting is stigmatic, exclusionary, and cannot be imposed without a specific show-cause notice and a meaningful hearing.

The timing invites attention. On March 11, a bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant directed the Union and state governments to disassociate Professor Michel Danino, Suparna Diwakar, and Alok Prasanna Kumar from all publicly funded curriculum work. The three had supervised the drafting of Chapter IV of the NCERT Class 8 textbook Exploring Society: India and Beyond, which contained a section on corruption in the judiciary.  The bench had banned the book in February in a suo motu case. The March 11 direction was issued without  hearing the three experts.

The NCERT textbook case is listed again on April 6. On March 20, the same CJI-led bench, hearing a related petition by former NCERT member Dr Pankaj Pushkar challenging a passage in an older textbook, remarked that “the judiciary should not be so oversensitive about healthy criticism.” The doctrinal principles that the P.S. Narasimha bench articulated on April 2 in another case, cast the March 11 direction in the NCERT case in sharper relief.

The facts in AKG Construction

The appellant held a contract for an Elevated Service Reservoir with Jharkhand’s Drinking Water and Sanitation Department. On June 1, 2024, the top dome collapsed. The Department issued a........

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