The High Court dismissed a writ petition filed by Odisha-based Agravanshi Private Limited that sought to overturn or restart the electronic auction of the Cavorem-Maina Mineral Block No. XVIII, over allegations of a technical portal glitch. The court ruled that a bidder’s isolated technical difficulties cannot be used to undermine the finality and sanctity of a concluded public auction.


The legal dispute centered on the e-auction for Cavorem-Maina Mineral Block No. XVIII, conducted on May 12, 2026, via the MSTC e-auction portal. Agravanshi Private Limited claimed it was locked in an active bidding war with another respondent firm.


According to the petitioner, when the respondent raised its bid to 88.88%, Agravanshi intended to submit a higher counteroffer but was prevented from doing so because the MSTC portal allegedly froze, became non-responsive, and timed out. To support its claim, the company submitted browser screenshots showing a “Page unresponsive” message and connection timeouts.


Agravanshi argued that, having previously secured mineral blocks at premiums up to 125%, it had no commercial reason to drop out of the bidding at 88.88%. It asked the court to either resume the auction from the last valid stage or order a fresh round among qualified bidders.

Auction portal MSTC provided system data showing its servers were stable during the contested time window. According to MSTC’s logs, 70 different auctions across India were running simultaneously on the portal; 194 bidders participated successfully, submitting 1,041 bids across 168 items, and no other participant reported server-side failures or connection issues.


Dismissing the petition, the High Court emphasized that writ jurisdiction cannot be used to conduct roving forensic audits of local browser errors or to substitute the commercial decisions of administrative bodies. The court further observed that “a screenshot of the error is proof of the error displayed to the user; it is not proof of the technical cause of that error.”