1. Before we delve into the substance, we would love to hear about your journey. What first drew you to competition law, and how has your perspective on the field evolved with over two decades of teaching it?
Thank you, Yusra and Ananya, for having me here for this interview, and I am excited to share that journey. When I started my academic career, I was still completing my PhD — and that was precisely the time when competition law evolved in India. As we all know from the historical background, we had the MRTP Act, which in my student time was not considered a very ‘happening’ statute. But then came 2002, and the Competition Act announced its presence. I began teaching at IP University in Delhi, and when the subject was included in the course, nobody was ready to teach it. Because I came from contract and commercial laws, the responsibility fell on me.
In the twenty-three years since, I have practically witnessed the entire journey — the first selections to the CCI, the people joining, the initial cases, and, importantly, my students. I give all the credit to my students: sometimes you credit your professors, but often it is your students who teach you. My first batch, and then the following batches — every time I taught abuse of dominant position and anti-competitive agreements, the subject was alive and growing. When I taught in 2009, the Competition Act did not yet have teeth: enforcement was partial and the CCI did not have the power to adjudicate; the first case had been about the constitutional validity of the Act itself. My first public lecture outside the classroom was on the evolving jurisprudence of competition law in India. From there it went to training programmes, setting question papers, and writing research papers on the subject. The competition story — abuse of dominant position, mergers and acquisitions — was genuinely mind-boggling, and because it was evolving, it was not difficult to capture.
2. Your 2012 case study examined the DLF Belaire judgment on abuse of dominant position, one of the CCI’s earliest and most defining interventions. It has been more than a decade. How has that case shaped the way the CCI approaches dominance in the real estate and infrastructure sectors, and does its reasoning still hold up to today’s standards?
Ananya, that is again one of the cases closest to my heart, because I worked on it closely. The Belaire Owners’ Association judgment was an impactful one: it changed the way people looked at the powers of the authority. We used to describe the CCI as a watchdog or a regulator, but this was different. Nobody was regulating the big builders — DLF being the giant player of the market — and the judgment taught buyers that you need not fight the builder alone; solidarity, if you are together working for a cause, works. And then there were the kinds of arbitrary clauses in the agreement. As a contract law teacher, those fascinated me: the builder could, arbitrarily, change the parking, the covered area or the carpet area simply because it was the builder. For the first time, the penalty imposed was exemplary, and it was the home buyers — people whose hard-earned money went into the purchase; in a country like India, you take a lifetime to build a house — who were vindicated. How can someone be empowered to change the conditions of that contract arbitrarily? That is where Sections 3 and 4 became so important: for the next ten years, every single case, I worked on and read, and every time I felt the jurisprudence grow.
And the second part of your question — whether that reasoning still holds relevance today. Yes, of course it does. Alongside Belaire, we had seen the BCCI case, the Goa Lottery case, the Jindal Steel case, the Doordarshan case. Those initial cases set the tone that if it is Otis Elevator, it is not only about Otis Elevator — there is a consumer at the other end. That is the overlap, the interface between competition and consumer protection laws, and I think that journey was very well taken up by the regulator, the way it should have been.
3. On consumer protection laws and competition: you have a paper on promoting fair competition to protect consumer rights, in which you examined the interface between competition and consumer policy. Given that this Centre itself stands at that very intersection, how do you see the relationship between the CCI and consumer protection authorities evolving in India? And where do you think the two frameworks still work at cross purposes rather than in tandem with each other?
I compliment your research on my work, and the way the questions should be dealt with for the audience. The period from roughly 2010 to 2020 was when the definitions were taking shape. Not only in the Competition Act — those letters were actually being lived into the judgments. The interface drew strength from the functioning, the activities and the decisions of the CCI, and in turn consumer awareness was promoted. One part was taken care of by the Competition Act, which taught the entire world that being dominant is not the only thing that is bad — if you abuse that dominance, that is really what is bad. And it is not that cartelisation is something absolutely, entirely wrong; it is the object of the arrangement that matters. We grew up seeing that schools would sell their books from the same premises and force parents to buy the bags or the uniform. That tie-in arrangement can be wrong — but if you are PVR, you do not have the power to control the consumer in that way. All those initial cases were landmark in that sense.
Under the Consumer Protection Act, by contrast, you had to prove that you had purchased the good or service only for your consumption; the definitions of ‘consumer’ and of agreement between the parties moved in the other direction. I think the Indian Competition Act has been very well articulated, though no such Act is complete. And the extraterritorial jurisdiction given to the 2002 Act was again exemplary — a far-sighted vision. It was a natural progression from the MRTP Act and the consumer protection framework into the Competition Act.
4. Are there any methods that you would suggest be adopted — be it by the government or by individual practitioners — to increase the smooth functioning at the intersection of the CCI and consumer protection authorities?
The CCI and the consumer protection authorities operate under two separate pieces of legislation, so the question is how they mesh. There had been so many areas where there was no contradiction as far as redressal was concerned. Consumer protection authorities primarily focused on vertical relationships — consumer grievances and defective goods — and on unfair trade practices. The CCI, at least initially, focused on macro-level horizontal relationships: abuse of dominant position, anti-competitive mergers. The CCI is broadly a regulator that has to levy penalties to clean up market distortion, but it does not award personal damages; in consumer protection, the consumer courts existed for individual compensation. The mandates of Sections 20 and 21 of the Competition Act required other authorities and consumer fora to route macroeconomic market distortions to the CCI, and cooperation with the Central Consumer Protection Authority followed: a joint committee on standard operating procedures assured that overlapping areas — misleading pricing, or sometimes platform bias — are addressed systematically, and there has been no conflict in the orders. This is what I have seen.
The CCI also had the power to assess how tech monopolies would impact consumer choices, data accessibility, network effects, and so on — and then came the DPDP Act. Consumer advocacy broadened the scope further, because of expanding consumer awareness. When we speak of the 2009 position, when only a few provisions were in operation, Section 49 already spoke of competition advocacy — both the enforcement provisions and the task of creating awareness. I think the regulator became quite successful: class action complaints can be filed under the Consumer Protection Act, and at the same time information and reports can be filed with the CCI by consumers. I hope I make the point clear.
5. Your 2019 chapter examined the inclusion of competition clauses in trade agreements between India and Canada. With global trade tensions and a renewed focus on bilateral agreements since then, do you think India has made meaningful progress in harmonising its competition policy with its trade partners, or does this largely remain an underdeveloped area of Indian trade negotiations?
That chapter I had contributed earlier and presented at a conference of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, which mainly focuses on developments in Canada and India — hence the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement and the inclusion of competition clauses in that bilateral agreement. I would not say there has been rapid collaboration between the countries, but the common law origin of both countries is one positive aspect of their relationship. There are differences too: in Canada, even criminal enforcement is there, whereas India has been used to administrative, civil enforcement. Even so, if you remember that export case, the thrust in both countries is the same: you do not distort the domestic markets, or exploit import dependencies.
I am short of fresh empirical studies this time, but a lot of changes have taken place. The energy sector is one area to work on, critical minerals another: Canada is leveraging the supply of civil uranium, LNG and critical tech minerals to secure long-term energy supply agreements, and agricultural tariffs are live issues. These are the areas where I think both countries can go, and where the Canadian Competition Bureau and the Indian CCI could together work on mergers. I have not studied that empirically or with reference to a special case, but this is what I feel.
6. Competition law remains unevenly taught across Indian law schools. What is your assessment of where legal education in this field stands, and how can law schools, law firms and the regulator work together to strengthen it?
Very important question. I must admit that there remains a gap — this is my opinion, based upon my experience. I have seen the casual nature of that specific area. Many law schools — and I am not talking about the NLUs; let us talk about the other five-year integrated colleges and universities, the traditional faculties — do not offer competition law as a subject. Some law schools offer it as part of the corporate law course; sometimes it is an optional or a seminar course. I remember the capacity-building programme at NLU Delhi: I introduced it as a full-fledged seminar course, and it was really popular because of the participation of the CCI. The participation of the regulator was important — my students wanted it, because they got to organise the event and invite the who’s who. We had Dr. Sahu there that time, if I may name her. CCI officials were keen to come to the law schools, and the students wanted to see them, but the interface was in the hands of academicians. As a professor, it is difficult, because in addition to your departmental workload it is something additional that you do. But with the support of the students, the law firms and, of course, the CCI, it became so smooth, so enjoyable and so discussion-worthy that I still feel bad that I did not publish everything we learned in those interactions. These kinds of programmes really set standards and are enjoyable for the students. I think it is a win-win situation for all the stakeholders.
7. You have been a member of the CCI Journal’s editorial board, and are in a position to see the full landscape of competition law scholarship being produced in India today. What kind of research or writing do you feel is currently missing from Indian competition law scholarship — the question that nobody is asking, but really should be?
This is a difficult question. I rate its difficulty level as high. Being a member of the editorial board is again challenging: alongside organising a workshop or a capacity-building programme, editorship brings additional assignments — certain articles come to you and you go through them. Most of the articles that I vetted were really good, because the review is divided among the whole editorial board, and being peer-reviewed means you can have inputs from the best of the brains. What I feel is missing is not the choice of the topic but the depth — the seriousness with the topic. Every time I tell the author — and as an author I also feel it — that we need to spend time with that particular topic, catch up with the latest trends, and it is not that every time we become critical of why and how this has happened; we should also ask why this should not have happened, so that we are able to have that honest opinion about the world.
I am one who always believes that we must honestly compliment. If, in front of me, Yusra and Ananya — who are quite new to competition law — are doing an excellent job, I should be there to compliment them. The same is true for the young authors and the authors who have been seniors. If it is a CCI member, or a professor like me who is contributing, then a different level is expected; but we should not hold it against the newcomers that they do not have the adequate expertise or experience — their writings I value more. So I pass on the baton to the youngsters: rather than simply saying that the government or the system does not work this way, or that a regulator should not work this way, we should suggest that this can be a better alternative. Or, the way the Indian Supreme Court has repeatedly said: do not merely memorise or cram what the Supreme Court says, which is what we usually see in law schools. We should tell students — the CCI has done this; the US Department of Justice has done that. Now you compare and tell us: if the Indian regulator faces the same problem or a similar situation, how should we react? Rather than importing the law from any other country, because the ecosystems are different, we should modify it so that it becomes suitable to our ecosystem. So far it has been really good that our regulator thought of publishing and thought of inviting those who have worked in the area to contribute — quite an appropriate blend for the editorial board.
8. With the digital landscape shifting so quickly — AI among other things — how should competition law pedagogy itself evolve, particularly in bringing economics and financial analysis into what has traditionally been a law-dominated subject?
Yes — I want to say the word that you have talked about: evolving. It is a kind of shifting landscape. If we start from 1990, then come to 2000, then 2002 when the Competition Act happened, 2010 was a phase, 2010 to 2020 was another phase, and if we say 2020 to 2026, there have been a lot many phases. That period of transition has stretched, and it requires more effort on the part of academicians. In law schools we need to work on the changing landscape, like post-AI. Every piece of information is there; the point is, how do we actually see what is required in the market?
Competition law is, again, a very smart mix of economics and law and financial analysis, and that composition itself is good to look into. I am just a law professor, so I can give you inputs only from the law perspective, but the perspectives of economics and of financial analysts are also very important — though, to my understanding, law dominates, and it should be that the balance is there. The ideal legal pedagogy would be a mix of CFAs and financial analysts, as well as people from economics, who teach the tools. Then there are the takers, or the recipients, of that pedagogy: the students. Law students are also not usually very interested in understanding the economics or the financial part. Law always has a kind of boss behaviour — we ourselves become dominant, and we refuse to understand any other aspect. But that is what is undesirable. Students feel that everything has to come through industry experience or internships. Like my students at NLU Delhi, they just wanted to talk to the partners, nothing in between. But it is not that any partner is going to give you some sort of injection or some sort of syrup which you can just consume — no. That route has to be followed. So have patience, and listen to the theoretical aspects. That is what is also important.
9. You have also represented Indian academia at the National University of Singapore in March 2025, where you were pursuing a fellowship programme. What did that experience teach you about how Indian competition law and policy is actually perceived internationally? Are we seen as a maturing, credible jurisdiction, or still viewed as a work in progress?
It is not easy to summarise. During my fellowship, I was not only teaching competition law; at that time I was also working on restraint of trade. There have been many angles to it — the contract angle, the labour law angle, and the third dimension can be competition law. I did not look at the labour law angle at all; primarily it was contract, and to some extent the allied part was how the Department of Justice or the competition regulator works. I tried, at the National University of Singapore, to look at the kind of legal framework they had, and specifically we focused on the kind of agreements they can enter into and the restraints. The fellowship concept from the organisers was an interesting one: when you are there physically at the university, you see the functioning, you can even be there in the classes with the students and the faculty, and you try to take their perspectives.
And I was thrilled to see that so many Indian and Asian students try to decipher those angles — sometimes I feel that in Indian law schools we actually bombard our students with too many subjects and too many concepts. We should also pause and give students some space and some importance every time, so that whatever is coming to their mind related to competition, related to contract, they have time to segregate. That flagging is also essential. That is what I learnt.
10. For a law student trying to decide between pursuing competition law in academia versus going into practice, what would your honest advice be? And having spent over two decades in academia yourself, what do you wish someone had told you earlier in your career?
Thanks for asking this. Honestly — if somebody had asked me at your age what I wanted to do, I wanted to go into practice. Sometimes I thought I would be in an enforcement agency; I had even written a national award-winning essay on that theme in those days, because corporate and competition law were not yet the kind of buzzword. In the last twenty-five years, things have really changed. Law students today are far more aware, far more vigilant, career-conscious, and the options are in bulk, in plenty, because of digitisation and online platforms. In our times, we did not know. But today also, if I ask in a class — a cohort of a hundred — how many of you really want to take academics as a career option, the percentage will not be more than five to seven, and that is on the higher side. Being a commercial and corporate law teacher, I find roughly eighty-five per cent want to sit in law firms — to name the biggest law firms in India, or the Magic Circle firms in London, or the best of the firms in the USA — or in some banks, because they are highly paid jobs.
But I want all of you to sincerely think about which area really gives you that kind of kick, that interest — and then, again, go for excellence. That has been an old saying, but it still works. You should think about whether you are ready to spend your entire time in the law firms; the pay is hefty, but that may not be your cup of tea. Earning money is good, but along with earning money and excellence, see where you are able to breathe. And do not think that if you did not get the first option, it is over: out of sixty students in a cohort, only six will make it to the tier-one firms they wanted, and six will crack UPSC. What about the rest of the students? We should always have that backup option. And I have seen, to be very honest, students whom I never judged in class to be going to perform — of course the best ones performed — but those who were not, due to, say, a language barrier, who were not able to sit for longer hours, who did not understand the nuances of law at first: they also, with consistent efforts, excelled in whatever they did. Be honest to yourself, and be honest and sincere to your profession. And if you do not enjoy law — because I have seen many students juggling that; they do not enjoy law — there are various allied courses to explore. If you enjoy journalism, enjoy legal journalism; there will be engineers who can do the data work for you, and allied jobs in the courts. So look for other alternatives also. Today’s law students, especially in national law schools, are far more competent and far more aware. The only thing is: just have some more patience, and it will come to you.