In Crocs Inc USA v. M/s Bata India Ltd and Ors., the Delhi High Court, on 2nd July 2026, directed Crocs to pay Bata Rs. 24,63,400 in actual litigation costs. Hon’ble Justice Prathiba M. Singh delivered the order while deciding an application filed by Bata under Sections 35 and 35A read with Section 151 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, seeking costs after the underlying design infringement suit had been disposed of following cancellation of Crocs’ registered design.
The order is a useful illustration of how commercial courts in India now treat costs, not as an afterthought tacked onto a final judgment, but as a substantive consequence that a losing party must actually bear.
Background of the Case
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Crocs Inc USA filed the present suit in 2014 seeking a permanent injunction restraining Bata India Ltd from infringing its Design Registration No. 197685, which it claimed possessed a novel shape, feature and configuration. Crocs alleged that Bata’s footwear was a fraudulent and obvious imitation of its registered design and sought both injunction and damages. The suit was filed before the District Judge, Central District, Tis Hazari Courts, Delhi, and on 28th August 2014 the District Judge granted an ex parte ad interim injunction, appointing Local Commissioners who went on to seize a substantial quantity of the allegedly infringing goods from Bata’s premises.
Bata filed its written statement raising a defence of invalidity of the design, following which the seized goods were de sealed and the matter moved to the High Court. Bata also filed an application under Order XXXIX Rule 4 of the Code seeking vacation of the interim order. On 8th February 2018, a Single Judge of the Delhi High Court decided the interim injunction applications across seven connected suits together, holding that the design was not novel and that the footwear in question had already existed in the public domain before registration. The interim injunctions were dismissed, the Order XXXIX Rule 4 applications were allowed, and the Court awarded actual costs to the defendants under Section 35 of the Code as applicable to commercial disputes, along with a further Rs. 2 lakh. A Division Bench upheld this order on 24th January 2019.
Crocs then approached the Supreme Court. The Special Leave Petition, titled M/s Crocs Inc. USA v. M/s Liberty Shoes Ltd. & Anr., was disposed of by order dated 23rd September 2019, which directed that the costs awarded at the interim stage would remain subject to the final outcome of the suit, and that Crocs would pay the costs to the respondent within four weeks. An execution petition for recovery of those costs has remained pending since.
The Design Cancellation and Disposal of the Suit
While the injunction battle wound through the appellate hierarchy, a parallel proceeding was unfolding before the Patent Office. The Deputy Controller of Patents and Designs, acting on a cancellation petition filed by M/s Brainbees Solutions Pvt. Ltd., cancelled Design Registration No. 197685 by an order dated 9th May 2019. The Controller held that a design published prior to the date of registration cannot be treated as new, and found that the features Crocs claimed to have added did not alter the character or identity of a design already published and known in the art. The Controller accordingly held that the design could not be regarded as new or original under Section 2(g) of the Designs Act, 2000, and cancelled the registration.
Once informed of this cancellation, the Delhi High Court, by order dated 12th July 2023, held that the suit could no longer continue given that its very foundation, the registered design, had been cancelled on the ground of lack of novelty and prior publication. The Court disposed of the suit along with all pending applications and discharged the Local Commissioner appointed to record evidence. It did, however, leave the door open, recording that if Crocs succeeded in its pending appeal against the cancellation order, its remedies would remain available to be pursued in accordance with law. The Court separately noted that Crocs had also filed parallel proceedings against Bata concerning the shape trademark associated with the same footwear, and that those proceedings, along with related passing off claims, remained pending before the Single Judge and the Division Bench respectively.
Bata’s Application for Costs
Bata subsequently filed I.A. 25948/2023 seeking an order for costs under Sections 35 and 35A of the Code. Crocs opposed the application, arguing that the July 2023 order disposing of the suit had not itself awarded any costs and that Bata could not now seek them separately. The Court rejected this argument at an earlier hearing on 7th February 2026, holding that mere non mention of costs in the disposal order could not, prima facie, amount to a waiver, particularly since that order had expressly kept open the possibility of the suit being revived depending on the outcome of the appeal against the design cancellation. At that same hearing, the Court directed the Registry to place on record a note explaining how costs are computed in matters of this kind, and the Registry duly filed a note tracing the process to Chapter XXIII Rule 5 of the Delhi High Court Original Side Rules, 2018, which sets out the heads of cost a bill may include, ranging from court fees and advocate’s fees to expenses tied to delay, frivolous objections and the monetary stakes involved in the proceedings.
At the hearing that led to the present order, Mr. Riccardo Facchin, Crocs’ global IP head, joined proceedings remotely from Amsterdam and addressed a procedural point regarding the appointment of a constituted attorney to sign pleadings on the company’s behalf, a practice he described as one Crocs follows across several jurisdictions. On the substantive question of costs, Senior Advocate Ms. Swathi Sukumar, appearing for Crocs, submitted that the Court could determine costs without prejudice to the separate pending suit concerning passing off. Mr. Neeraj Grover, appearing for Bata, placed before the Court a bill of costs totalling Rs. 24,63,400, inclusive of the costs earlier determined under the 8th February 2018 order of the Single Judge, supported by documents and an affidavit. Crocs did not dispute this figure.
Court’s Reasoning
Justice Singh anchored her reasoning in the Supreme Court’s decision in Uflex Ltd. v. Government of Tamil Nadu & Ors., which had earlier laid down that costs in commercial litigation ought ordinarily to follow the event, that realistic costs must be awarded given the rising expense of litigation, and that a proper costs regime serves to discourage frivolous and vexatious proceedings. The Court traced the full procedural history of the dispute, spanning the District Court, the Delhi High Court at both the Single Judge and Division Bench levels, and the Supreme Court, and observed that Bata had been made to defend itself at every one of these stages while the design underlying the suit stood cancelled for want of novelty. The Court recorded that the courts had, on repeated occasions, held that Crocs’ design was not novel, reinforcing the view that Bata had been compelled into prolonged litigation to defend a position that ultimately proved correct.
Applying Sections 35 and 35A of the Code, the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, and Chapter 23 Rule 5 of the Delhi High Court Original Side Rules, 2018, the Court directed Crocs to pay Bata the undisputed sum of Rs. 24,63,400 within three months. The Court further directed that Bata’s pending execution proceedings, filed to recover the costs awarded at the interim stage in 2018, would stand disposed of once this amount was paid, effectively consolidating the two cost recovery tracks that had been running since the interim order.
Conclusion
Crocs Inc USA v. M/s Bata India Ltd and Ors. is a reminder that costs orders in Indian commercial litigation are no longer symbolic gestures. For over a decade, courts routinely awarded costs that bore little relationship to what a party had actually spent defending itself, and litigants budgeted for this reality when deciding whether to pursue or resist a claim. The Uflex principle, applied here in full, changes that calculation. When a party like Bata can walk into court with a documented bill of Rs. 24,63,400, tie it to years of proceedings before four different judicial forums, and see that entire figure awarded without discount, the economics of pursuing weak intellectual property claims shift meaningfully.
What stands out to me in this case is the timeline itself. Crocs obtained an ex parte injunction in 2014 that allowed it to seize a competitor’s stock, only for that very design to be found unoriginal, first by a Single Judge on the merits of novelty in 2018, and then independently by the Deputy Controller of Patents and Designs in 2019 on cancellation proceedings. Two separate forums, applying two different tests, reached the same conclusion about the same design. Rights holders enforcing a design registration that has not been rigorously vetted for novelty before filing run precisely this risk, and this judgment shows that the risk now carries a real financial consequence attached to it, not merely the loss of the injunction itself.
Case Title: Crocs Inc USA v. M/s Bata India Ltd and Ors., CS(COMM) 625/2018, Delhi High Court, decided on 2nd July 2026.
