Vijai Pratap Singh

A career in the law

1. 1978 – 1979

   Allahabad

   Mr Singh read law at Allahabad University and graduated in 1978. Within a year he had cleared the Uttar Pradesh Provincial Civil Service (Judicial) examination, and in 1979 he took his seat as a Munsif Magistrate, one of the youngest officers to enter the State’s judiciary.

2. 1979 – 2015

   Thirty-six years in the courts of Uttar Pradesh

   The district courts are where most of India’s litigation begins and ends, and Mr Singh spent thirty-six years in them. He began in the Munsif’s court, hearing civil suits and criminal cases at first instance, and rose through each rank of the service into the Higher Judicial Services.

   As District and Sessions Judge he headed the judiciary of several districts, among them Agra and Kanpur. The office joins the highest civil and criminal jurisdiction in a district to the administration of all its courts: sessions trials, civil appeals, and the supervision of every judge who sits below.

   On deputation he presided as Member of the Sales Tax Tribunal at Meerut, which added tax adjudication to his experience. He superannuated from the Uttar Pradesh Higher Judicial Services in 2015, with the command of civil and criminal law that comes only from decades of trial and appellate work.

3. 2016 – 2019

   A founding Member of the National Company Law Tribunal

   Retirement lasted a year. In 2016 the National Company Law Tribunal was constituted, and Mr Singh was appointed Member (Judicial) in its first batch of Members.

   It was an unusual moment to take the Bench. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code had been enacted that same year and there were no precedents under it. Questions that are settled law today, on when a company may be admitted into insolvency, on the powers of creditors and resolution professionals, on what a resolution plan may and may not do, came before the first Benches as open questions and had to be answered from the statute alone.

   He served as Judicial Member and Head of Department at Kolkata, Allahabad and Mumbai. In those years he heard and decided thousands of matters across the whole of the Tribunal’s jurisdiction: insolvency applications by banks, financial institutions and trade creditors; resolution plans and liquidations; petitions of oppression and mismanagement; and schemes of merger, amalgamation and arrangement.

   The insolvencies of Jaypee Infratech and Sterling Biotech, two of the most closely followed proceedings of the Code’s early years, were among those heard before him.

4. 2019 – 2022

   Elevation to the Appellate Tribunal

   In 2019 Mr Singh was elevated to the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal as Member (Technical). The Appellate Tribunal hears appeals from every Bench of the NCLT in the country.

   He sat on its Benches at New Delhi and at Chennai until 2022, when he retired at the age of 67. The matters that came before him across the two Tribunals include, besides those already named, the proceedings concerning Antrix Corporation and Devas Multimedia, Dewan Housing Finance Corporation and Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services.

   More than 200 of his judgments are reported in the law journals. Several did more than decide the case at hand: positions they took were later written into the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code itself, by amendment.

5. 2022 – present

   At the Bar

   Mr Singh did not retire a second time. Since 2022 he has practised as an advocate before the Supreme Court of India and the High Courts, and he is consulted on company and insolvency law, where he now advises on provisions he once interpreted from the Bench.

   His practice extends to commercial disputes and intellectual property, and to real estate law under the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, a subject on which he has also written.

   He also sits as a neutral. He is empanelled as an arbitrator with the National Highways Authority of India and has conducted numerous arbitrations, and he is a Mediator certified by the Supreme Court.

   In 2026 he joined the Member Committee of the National Stock Exchange of India as an Independent External Professional. He is the Managing Partner of VPS Law Associates and a Partner of Revera Legal, New Delhi.

6. Throughout

   The writer

   Between court and consultation, Mr Singh writes. His columns and op-eds, on insolvency, company law, the tribunals and the judiciary itself, are published in SCC Times, Bar & Bench and LiveLaw, and are collected on this website.

   His opinions on questions of law and regulation are also carried frequently in the financial and economic press, including the Financial Times, Mint and Moneycontrol.