Force majeure – an uncontrollable action that prevents someone in fulfilling his or her contracts,
in that list does covid 19 considered as a force majeure?
Covid 19 is definitely not a vis major though it had made all the fields to get strucked down, and
made a big economic crisis throughout the world which made people to stop performing their
duties. if a event to be constitute as force majeure, they must be unforeseeable, external to the
parties of the contract, and unavoidable. this covid 19 made the terms of contract become
impossible to be performed, not because of the fault of the parties but something beyond their
control, it is not proper both legally and morally to impose liability.
For example, lets take a common middle class man who runs a departmental store his family
runs through the earnings they get from that store due to this lockdown which imposed many
restriction made the shop to be closed and also people were afraid of coming out and this caused
a major defect in his earnings which also have a great impact on doing his duty, and another
example an auto or a taxi driver’s life depend o the daily earnings he or she made through the
rides he has got many responsibilities like paying rent looking after the family and running their
life this lockdown due to covid 19 made him stop being fulfilling his or her duties though there is
not any human intervention but this covid 19 turns out to be an un controllable action that
prevent a common man from fulfilling his duty with this lockdown he was unable to pay the
house rent, the loans he took from banks, and many other duties and also he or she cant be made
liable. This non performance of the duty and contract applies to all level of people at different
manner. We need to have a codified law which exempts an affected party from performing its
obligations under the contract during the period of such lock downs and it have to be considered
as force majeure. The time has come that we should have law related to force majeure rather than
only drawing light from Section 32 of the Indian Contract Act or the contractual provisions.