India, March 5 -- India's track record in terms of legal interventions in commercial disputes with the government has been fraught with inconsistencies, even as ease of doing business has emerged as a major priority area.

In the 1990s, for instance, India opened petroleum and natural gas exploration for private players. An international bidding process that followed had Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and Niko Limited sign a Production Sharing Contract (PSC) for exploration before British Petroleum was inducted into it.

RIL and its partners drew migrated natural gas from basins adjoining the Krishna-Godavari (KG)-DWN-98/3 basin until the government maintained it was internally connected to the public sector undertaking Oil and Natural...