Contract dispute resolution — enforce what was agreed.

Getting the non-compete answer current, not just correct

Section 27 hasn't changed. What's changed is how consistently, and how recently, courts have confirmed it means what it says.

Saying post-termination non-competes are "generally not enforceable" under Section 27 is correct, but it understates how firmly and how recently Indian courts have reinforced that position. Two 2025 Delhi High Court decisions — Varun Tyagi v. Daffodil Software Private Limited and Neosky India Ltd v. Nagendran Kandasamy — both quashed injunctions built on post-termination restraints, explicitly reaffirming that India does not recognise the "reasonableness" or "partial restraint" doctrine that softens non-compete enforcement in the UK or US. A restraint is void unless it falls within a narrow statutory exception, and the burden of proving that exception applies sits entirely on the employer — reasonableness of the restriction is simply not a route to enforceability in Indian law. A January 2026 Bombay High Court decision reached the identical conclusion.

What genuinely deserves careful handling is a Supreme Court decision from the same period that some content risks over-reading. In Vijaya Bank v. Prashant Narnaware (2025 INSC 691), the Supreme Court upheld an employment bond requiring an employee to pay liquidated damages for leaving before completing a minimum service tenure — but the Court was explicit that the ruling should not be treated as definitive law validating restrictive covenants generally. It turned on the specific structure of a minimum-service bond with liquidated damages, not on a post-employment ban on competing. Citing Vijaya Bank as evidence that non-competes are becoming enforceable would be a real misreading of a narrow, fact-specific holding.

For SaaS and technology clients specifically, this matters in a very concrete way — engineering and product talent mobility is high, and a departing employee's access to source code, model weights, or customer data is exactly the kind of interest that a properly drafted confidentiality clause protects, where a generic "won't join a competitor for 12 months" clause is now more likely than ever to be struck down on first challenge.