New Delhi, Sept. 18 -- In an increasingly paperless judiciary where a filing can depend on a password arriving on a phone, the Supreme Court has made clear that a missing one-time password (OTP) cannot, by itself, mean a missing remedy. The Supreme Court has ruled that failed OTP deliveries cannot become a court's excuse to shut the door on a litigant, underlining that a technical failure in a judicial e-filing system cannot be used to defeat a bona fide litigant on limitation. In a judgment that places the responsibility for increasingly digitised courts squarely on the institutions running them, a bench of justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu said that a litigant cannot be made to suffer when a court or tribunal's own system is incapable of receiving a filing within the prescribed period. "In the current age, as the judiciary becomes increasingly digitised, scrutinising any delay due to technical difficulties beyond the litigant's control is all the more relevant," held the bench, invoking the Latin maxim "actus curiae neminem gravabit"-- an act of the court should prejudice no one. The principle, the court said, means that limitation runs against a litigant only when the court or tribunal is open and functional in the meaningful sense that it is capable of receiving the papers the litigant is bona fide seeking to present. "When the system of the court/tribunal fails to receive the papers, which are sought to be presented bona fide and within the prescribed time, the litigant cannot be rendered remediless on the specious ground that the court/tribunal has no power to condone the delay," it declared in a judgment delivered on September 10 and released Wednesday. In the present case, the court lamented that "failed 'one-time password' deliveries ensured that the appellant was shown the door, thereby sealing its fate." The case concerned an appeal by the Regional Provident Fund Commissioner-II against an order of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), which had rejected the appeal as time-barred. The SC found that the appeal could not be filed within the statutory period not because of any negligence or misunderstanding by the appellant, but because of a technical failure in NCLAT's e-filing system. The court, while acknowledging that the NCLAT had no power under Section 61(2) of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) to condone a delay beyond the maximum 45-day period, said this was not a conventional case of condonation of delay. Instead, the first bona fide attempt to file the appeal had to be treated as the relevant date of presentation, with the period during which the tribunal's e-filing system was non-functional effectively excluded from the calculation of limitation. "Should a litigant be shown the door at the very first instance due to e-filing of an appeal beyond the statutorily condonable period, particularly when such a filing has been delayed for bona fide reasons beyond the litigant's control and when the fault was entirely at the end of the Registry of the NCLAT? We think not!" said the bench. The dispute arose from an order of NCLT, Mumbai, approving a resolution plan for Rolta India Ltd on December 15, 2025. The provident fund commissioner sought to challenge the approval before the NCLAT. Under Section 61(2) of the IBC, an appeal has to be filed within 30 days, with the NCLAT empowered to condone a delay of up to another 15 days. The 45-day outer limit in the case expired on January 29, 2026. The appellant's counsel began trying to e-file the appeal on January 28, before the expiry of the outer limit. But the filing could not go through because of technical problems with OTP delivery. The next day, January 29, the Registry informed the appellant that a backend technical defect was being repaired. The appeal was finally filed on January 30, merely one day beyond the outer limit. The NCLAT nevertheless rejected the appeal, holding that it had no jurisdiction to condone a delay beyond 45 days. It relied on earlier SC rulings emphasising the strict limitation regime applicable to appeals under the IBC. The SC did not disturb that proposition of law. Instead, it drew a crucial distinction between a litigant who simply misses a statutory deadline and one who tries to file within time but is prevented from doing so by the court's own machinery. The NCLAT Registry's report, the bench noted, itself established that the appellant had made the requisite efforts to e-file the appeal from January 28 and that the filing was held up because of "technical issues with OTP delivery". It held that the NCLAT ought to have adopted a "course correction" instead of treating the appellant as having crossed the statutory deadline, pointing out that the appellant's prayer for condonation of delay had, in substance, sought a recognition that the appeal should legally be treated as having been presented on the date of its first bona fide attempt. "Absent such direction, it would tantamount to making the litigant suffer for the actus curiae (act of the court)," said the court, setting aside the NCLAT order and restored the appeal and the application for reconsideration of the delay. It directed the NCLAT to examine whether the appellant had sufficient cause and, if it decided in the appellant's favour, register and decide the appeal in accordance with law. To be sure, the ruling does not dilute the strict limitation regime under the IBC. Rather, it draws a line between a deadline missed by a litigant and a deadline that a court's own technology prevented the litigant from meeting....