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Case law › Supreme Court › Jonas Woodhead and Sons (India) Ltd v CIT
Supreme CourtHelps departments.37(1)s.256(1)s.34 (Act of 2025)

Jonas Woodhead and Sons (India) Ltd v CIT

My collaboration agreement pays the foreign company a running royalty on turnover. The Department wants to treat a quarter of it as capital. Can a single royalty be split at all?

The Income-tax Act, 1961 was repealed on 1 April 2026. It still governs income earned up to 31 March 2026, and every proceeding about those years however late — assessment, reassessment, rectification, penalty, revision and appeal alike. Income earned from 1 April 2026 is governed by the Income-tax Act, 2025. What changed, and which Act governs your year →

My collaboration agreement pays the foreign company a running royalty on turnover. The Department wants to treat a quarter of it as capital. Can a single royalty be split at all?

It can. The Supreme Court upheld a finding that a quarter of the royalty was capital, on facts where the foreign firm had not merely supplied technical know-how but had furnished plans and designs and rendered valuable services in setting up the factory itself, the business was new, and after the agreement expired there was no bar on the assessee continuing to make the product. The Court held it difficult to treat the whole payment as revenue merely because it was calculated as a percentage of gross turnover. How the money is paid does not settle what it was paid for.

Decided by the Supreme Court (Supreme Court of India - S.C. Agrawal and G.B. Pattanaik JJ) on 1997-02-11, reported as [1997] 224 ITR 342 (SC); appeals by special leave from the judgment of the Madras High Court reported at [1979] 117 ITR 55. It bears on section 37(1), section 256(1), section 34 (Act of 2025) of the Income Tax Act 1961, in Deductions & Disallowances and How Tax Law Is Read matters.

Still good law. The decision stands and is the authority relied on whenever the Department seeks to split a collaboration payment rather than disallow it whole. Courts print the citation when they deal with a composite payment - the Bombay High Court in Commissioner of Income-tax v Kirloskar Tractors Ltd. on 3 February 1998, the Madras High Court in Southern Pressings (P.) Ltd. on 9 January 1998 and in Sakthi Sugars on 10 August 2010, the Delhi High Court in J K Synthetics on 17 December 2008, and the Supreme Court itself in Commissioner of Income Tax v Bharti Hexacom Ltd. on 16 October 2023, where the character of a telecom licence fee was in issue. It has to be read with Alembic Chemical Works Co. Ltd. v Commissioner of Income Tax, and the two do not conflict. This judgment quotes Alembic at length and adopts its reasoning, then applies it to facts that point the other way: the foreign firm did not merely supply know-how but furnished plans and designs and rendered valuable services in setting up the factory itself, the business was new, and on the expiry of the agreement there was no bar on the assessee continuing to manufacture. Alembic is the case where an existing line of production was improved. This is the case where a business was established. Read together they mark both sides of the same line. Two limits on how far it travels. The Court did not lay down the quarter as a proportion; that figure was the Tribunal's on these facts and was not disturbed, and nothing in the judgment supplies a method for arriving at any other figure. And the Court expressly reasoned that the mode of payment does not settle the character of the payment - a royalty geared to turnover is not revenue merely because it is geared to turnover. The Income-tax Act, 1961 was repealed on 1 April 2026 by section 536(1) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, and section 536(2)(c) continues it for proceedings about tax years beginning before that date, so the case governs those years directly. The general deduction is now section 34 of the 2025 Act.

Why it matters

Apportionment is the outcome a practitioner meets most often in a collaboration or technology dispute, and it is the outcome least well supported by the cases usually cited. Alembic gives the taxpayer a full allowance and Bharti Hexacom gives the Department a wholly capital character; this is the decision that says a single composite payment can be part one and part the other, and it is the Supreme Court. Two things in it do work on the ground. The first is the list of factors, which is effectively a checklist to run against the agreement: new plant and process or improvement to an existing product, new business or existing business, what has to be returned when the contract ends and what may be kept, the cumulative effect of the terms, and whether anything was added to capital. An officer who has not gone through that list has not done the analysis the Supreme Court prescribed. The second is the refusal to let the mode of payment decide the question. A running royalty on turnover is the ordinary form of these agreements and it is the form most often relied on to argue that the whole payment must be revenue; this judgment holds that argument insufficient on its own. The case is therefore as useful for resisting an all-or-nothing position as for supporting one.

Binding on every court and authority in India.

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Related

Other authorities on the same sections.
Every authority on the provisions this decision turns on: all 75 on s.37(1) · all 31 on s.256(1)