The author considers the problem of finding designs insensitive to the presence of an outlier in a treatment-control block design setup for estimating the set of elementary contrasts between the effects of each test treatment and a control treatment. The criterion of robustness suggested by Mandal (1989) in block design setup for estimating a full set of orthonormal treatment contrasts is adapted. A new class viz. partially balanced treatment incomplete block designs (PBTIBD) is introduced and it is shown that balanced treatment incomplete block designs (BTIBD) and PBTIB designs, under certain conditions, are robust in the previous sense. Such designs are important in the sense that the inference on the treatment contrasts under consideration remain unaffected by the presence of an outlier. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.