Can Estoppel Create a Right Where the Law Creates None? Rethinking the Limits of Promissory Estoppel in India

Abstract

Promissory estoppel began its life in Indian law as a defensive tool: a way to stop someone from going back on a promise once another party had relied on it. Over the last five decades, though, the doctrine has drifted a long way from that starting point. Courts now describe it as capable of grounding an independent claim, of binding the Government even without a contract, and of doing so on facts that would once have seemed to demand a much narrower response. That drift raises a question the case law has never fully answered: if a promise, standing alone, can now support relief, has estoppel quietly turned into something the law never intended it to be, a mechanism for manufacturing rights that the underlying legal framework does not otherwise recognise? This paper argues that it should not, even where recent decisions read as if it already has. It traces the doctrine from its early public-law appearances through Motilal Padampat Sugar Mills and on to Manuelsons Hotels, and it separates two things that judgments tend to blur together: protecting a claimant’s reliance on a promise, and creating a substantive entitlement the law does not otherwise confer. The paper’s central move is to show that an independent cause of action is not the same thing as an independent legal right: a court can let a promise open the courthouse door without letting it rewrite the statute book. Building on that distinction, and on the limits already recognised in Kasinka Trading and Jit Ram Shiv Kumar, the paper proposes a four-stage test for identifying when estoppel has crossed from reliance protection into rights creation, and closes by arguing that promissory estoppel and legitimate expectation, though related, need to stay conceptually separate if either is to do useful work.