Legal Question in Business Law in India

Underwent a software development contract with a big corporate. In original 2 copies of agreement though signed by us in their office, one for us and other for company. They were supposed to send us our original copy post their signatures. This was in Oct last week sometime 2013. Still we haven't received our copy from them. Though the clauses of the same were exchanges over the e-mail and post our go ahead only the agreement was executed, i believe the leagl backing of the agreement is only once they have sent our copy to us. We haven't even seen the agreement copy signed by them. We did once remind them of the same.

However the correspondence for the execution of the work kept happening with the concerned department and things were on.

Today's situation is that we have crossed the timeframes of deliveries and still need more time for the delivery of the same, reasons for which are as follows :-

1) Late feedback from the client on their inputs on many occasions which resulted in our sequencing other jobs on machine and could ideally get back to their job on finishing this sequenced job. For instance if their feedback in coming in a week and my manpower and machines are already put on another task i cant immediately shift to their work despite their feedback. Instead have to wait for the current job on machine and then get back tot heir job.

2) Due to their dissatisfaction on some related graphics work at initial stage post which the entire graphics team was changed and all graphics were redone to their satisfaction which took additional 2 months.

3) Their advances came a month after the date committed as per the contract.

4) They verbally committed us bulk software development in one go and asked us to hire a team accordingly and thus we gave them bulk rates. But even a month post of our hiring they failed to give us more assignment saying that they wanna first check on our output of this lot. Due to this we underwent vast infeasible investment like hiring for bulk deliveries which they failed to honour as per words.

Now today, 16th May ( thru hardcopy and on 14th May via e-mail) we have received a notice from the legal department of the corporate asking us to deliver within a week failing which they shall initiate legal proceedings on our expense.

How should we answer the notice in order to buy time? We are sure to deliver and get done with it. We are a start-up venture in Mumbai and don't have bandwidth to invest on these unproductive controversies.

Can we at this stage just say that we are still not in possession of any agreement thus don't know what they talking about and thus their notice is void and invalid at this stage? After all the legal backing of the agreement is subjected to both parties signing it and receiving their respective copies.

Kindly reply at the earliest and help.

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