High Court Test 20
10 min40 WPM required437 words
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Land acquisition law in India has been transformed by the enactment of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which replaced the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894 and sought to address the many criticisms of the earlier law, including inadequate compensation, forced displacement of communities without resettlement, lack of transparency, and the use of the urgency clause to bypass consultation requirements. The 2013 Act is premised on a fundamentally different philosophy regarding the state's power of eminent domain — the power to compulsorily acquire private property for public purposes — recognising that acquisition causes social disruption and economic loss to those whose land is taken, and that the state has a duty not merely to compensate them monetarily but to rehabilitate and resettle them comprehensively. The determination of compensation under the 2013 Act uses a market value based approach, taking the higher of the value registered in recent sale deeds or the consented amount paid in private purchases in the vicinity, and then multiplying it by a factor prescribed for rural and urban areas before adding a solatium of one hundred percent of the total compensation. The multiplication factor for rural areas in cases where no urgency applies is twice the market value, effectively giving farmers at least four times the registered sale value as compensation. The social impact assessment, a new feature introduced by the 2013 Act, requires an assessment of the likely social impacts of the acquisition, including the number of families to be affected, the nature of the impact on their livelihoods, and the adequacy of the proposed rehabilitation measures, before the acquisition proceeds. Consent of eighty percent of affected families is required before land is acquired for private companies, and seventy percent consent is required for public-private partnership projects, a provision that was significantly diluted by state-level amendments. Rehabilitation and resettlement entitlements under the Act go beyond monetary compensation to include alternative land, employment for an adult member of each affected family, housing, access to civic amenities in the resettlement site, and other benefits. The urgency clause, under which acquisition could be effected without following the normal procedural safeguards, has been significantly narrowed in the 2013 Act to cover only genuine national security and defence emergencies. Land acquisition for rural infrastructure under specified categories of projects is exempt from the consent and social impact assessment requirements. The High Courts and the Supreme Court continue to hear a large volume of litigation on land acquisition matters, dealing with challenges to acquisition notifications, disputes about compensation, and complaints about failure to implement rehabilitation and resettlement obligations.