(Winning an arbitration is often the easy part; collecting on the award across jurisdictions is where the real contest begins.)
Introduction: The Award as an Unexecuted Instrument
An arbitral award, at the end of the day, however meticulously reasoned and however large the sum it commands, is at the end of the day only a piece of paper. The tribunal that renders such an award dissolves the moment its mandate ends, leaving the award holder holding a judgement on merits but nothing resembling actual decreetal amount. What follows is the recognition of that award in foreign courts, the tracing of assets across borders and fighting off every objection the other side can raise to delay or avoid payment. This becomes even harder when the award debtor is a government, because states can claim sovereign immunity as a shield against having their property seized or attached. Enforcement therefore requires the award holder to borrow the coercive power of a national court, and to do so separately in every jurisdiction where the debtor happens to hold assets. For this reason alone, cross border arbitration is front – loaded, the merits are decided once, in a single forum, under a single set of rules whereas recovery must be litigated repeatedly, under as many procedural regimes as there are asset locations
Enforcement Regime in India
India is a useful example to study this problem, because in a very unique way, it has been on both sides such disputes. On one hand, Indian courts have built a fairly strong, pro-enforcement system for foreign awards being enforced in India. On the other hand, India itself has been an award-debtor in major cases like Cairn Energy and Devas–Antrix, and in those cases, Indian assets abroad including government property in Paris and even Air India's planes and accounts, were targeted for seizure by companies trying to recover what they were owed. This gap between how India treats enforcement as a court and how India behaves as a debtor is what makes the country such a good case study for understanding why winning an award is often the easy part, and collecting on it and executing it, is where the real battle begins.
The Law on Enforcing Foreign Awards
Alongwith seeing how India acts as a judgement debtor, it is pertinent to first understand how Indian law treats foreign awards when India is the enforcing court, and not a party to the dispute. The relevant law when it comes to enforcement of foreign awards in an Indian jurisdiction is Section 48 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996. The provision lists a small, fixed set of conditions, a party can use to resist enforcement of a foreign award in India. These conditions range from the arbitration agreement being invalid, a party not getting a fair chance to present its case, the tribunal going beyond its jurisdiction, or the award being against the public policy of the land. The idea behind this provision is the fact that these objections are meant to be an exception, and not a routine second chance to reargue the whole case.
The Supreme Court locked this narrow approach in place through two landmark rulings. In Vijay Karia v. Prysmian Cavi E Sistemi SRL, (2020) 11 SCC 1, decided on 13 February 2020, a group of Indian shareholders tried to resist enforcement of four London-seated awards, including on the ground that the award violated India's foreign exchange rules (FEMA); the Court rejected every objection, holding that an enforcing court cannot act like an appellate court and re-examine the merits of the dispute, that even a technical FEMA breach doesn't automatically block enforcement since the RBI can itself allow or correct it, and it went on to impose costs of ₹50 lakh on the resisting party for what it saw as a delay tactic.
If Section 48 jurisprudence shows India talking the role of a pro-enforcement jurisdiction, the Cairn Energy dispute shows what happens when India itself is the debtor. In 2012, India retrospectively amended its tax law to reach indirect transfers of Indian assets, and in 2015 used it to raise a USD 1.6 billion demand on Cairn UK Holdings Ltd over a 2006 restructuring, enforcing the demand by seizing Cairn's remaining shares in its former Indian subsidiary, confiscating dividends, and adjusting a separate tax refund owed to it. Cairn took the dispute to arbitration under the India–UK Bilateral Investment Treaty, and in December 2020 a tribunal ruled unanimously that the retrospective tax breached India's fair and equitable treatment obligations, awarding Cairn roughly USD 1.2 billion plus interest and costs. India refused to pay, so Cairn went after Indian state assets abroad. In July 2021, a French court allowed Cairn to seize around twenty Indian government-owned properties in central Paris worth over €20 million, while in the US Cairn moved against Air India's aircraft, cargo equipment, and even artwork, arguing Air India was effectively an "alter ego" of the Indian state. The pressure reportedly pushed Indian public-sector banks to shield their dollar deposits abroad from possible seizure. The saga ended in Parliament with the enactment of the Taxation Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021, which withdrew the retrospective tax demands and refunded amounts collected, on condition that companies like Cairn drop all pending claims against India worldwide. Cairn accepted, withdrew every enforcement action globally, and received a refund of about ₹7,900 crore. The point as such was that it isn't that Indian courts failed Cairn, the enforcement never touched Indian courts at all; it happened entirely abroad, against Indian assets sitting in reach of foreign judges, which is exactly where a sovereign debtor's real exposure and incapacity lies.
Devas–Antrix is the sharper proof, because India chose resistance instead of settlement, and the dispute is still unresolved a decade later. Antrix, ISRO's commercial arm, terminated a 2005 satellite-spectrum lease with Devas Multimedia; an ICC tribunal awarded Devas USD 562.5 million plus interest in 2015, and separate India–Mauritius BIT tribunals pushed total exposure past USD 1.2 billion. Winning those awards took a few years of arbitration. Collecting on them has taken far longer and remains incomplete: India responded with a CBI fraud investigation into Devas and an NCLT order liquidating the company for fraudulent incorporation Undeterred, Devas's shareholders went after Indian assets abroad exactly as Cairn had, a Montreal court attaching Air India's funds through the IATA settlement system in December 2021, parallel seizure attempts happened in France and the fight escalated all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 2025 that sovereign immunity law imposes no extra jurisdictional hurdle for award-creditors. Ten years after the ICC award, Devas still does not have its money; it has only won the right to keep fighting in more courts.
Conclusion
Both these dispute point to the same underlying mechanism, which is why "winning is easy, collecting is hard" isn't just a rhetorical statement, it describes an actual legal structure. Sovereign immunity operates in two layers: immunity from jurisdiction (can a court even hear the enforcement case) and immunity from execution (can it actually seize a specific asset). The first is shrinking, the 2025 Devas ruling and India's own Section 48 jurisprudence both show courts increasingly willing to let creditors in the door. The second is where sovereigns still hold the advantage, which is precisely why creditors don't bother chasing treasury accounts and instead go after commercially active instrumentalities like Air India, entities close enough to the state to be worth targeting, but separate enough to create a genuine legal fight over whether they can be touched at all.
That is the real lesson for an award holder wherein enforceability cannot be an afterthought bolted on once an award is already in hand. It has to be built into the transaction from the start, through careful seat selection, due diligence on where the counterparty's assets actually sit, and a realistic assessment of what recourse exists if that counterparty turns out to be a state. Arbitration gives a party a judgment on the merits; it does not, by itself, give that party money. India's own record is a domestic law that promises minimal interference, set against years of asset-hunting in Cairn and a decade of unresolved litigation in Devas–Antrix , makes the distinction unmistakable. Winning the award ends the dispute on paper. Collecting on it is where the actual contest is won or lost.