A Bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao and S. Ravindra Bhat held that there is a disturbing tendency of courts setting aside arbitral awards, after dissecting and reassessing factual aspects of the cases to conclude that the award needs intervention and thereafter, dubbing the award to be vitiated by either perversity or patent illegality, apart from the other grounds available for annulment of the award. The Court observed that such an approach would lead to corrosion of the object of the Arbitration Act and the endeavours made to preserve this object, which is minimal judicial interference with arbitral awards. The Bench opined that several judicial pronouncements of the Supreme Court would become a dead letter if arbitral awards are set aside by categorising them as perverse or patently illegal without appreciating the contours of the said expression. It was held that patent illegality should be the illegality that goes to the root of the matter. In other words, every error of law committed by the Arbitral Tribunal would not fall within the expression 'patent illegality'. Likewise, erroneous application of law cannot be categorised as patent illegality.