It Is Time To Revamp the Obsolete Land Acquisition Act of India

LARR 2013 was passed to correct the injustices of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. However, the truth is that the current act has also failed to protect the rights of marginalised landowners. 

The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (LARR, 2013), successor to the more notorious Land Acquisition Act, 1894 (LAA, 1894) came into effect on January 1, 2014. With its promise of rehabilitation schemes, social impact assessments, enhanced compensation and recognition of consent, LARR 2013 sought to replace its archaic and oppressive counterpart, and made significant strides at it too. In addition to transforming the process of land acquisition post 2014, the Act also came with limited, built-in measures to ensure fair compensation even in land acquisition initiated under the old law in certain cases. 

However, the act has failed to do so due to its narrow design, weak grievance mechanisms and loosely defined terms. Even after twelve years of its implementation, affected people still have to take to the streets simply to be heard. Be it the Parsis resisting redevelopment in Doongarwadi or the villagers in Pirpainti contesting delayed and inadequate compensation, the pattern is similarly marked by formal compliance by the state, and substantive injustice for those who lose their land.

The first problem lies in how loosely the law defines key terms such as ‘majority’ and ‘payment’. Instead of guaranteeing compensation to every affected landowner, the Act allows the state to rely on blanket claims of compliance. If the authorities manage to show that compensation has been paid to a ‘majority’, the law offers very little security to those left out. This ambiguity reduces what was meant to be a protective safeguard to a largely discretionary one. In Pirpainti, this gap can be felt in practice. Accounts from affected landowners point to inconsistencies in compensation, with some families yet to receive any payment and others disputing the adequacy of the amounts credited to them. Even though the state maintains that compensation has been paid to nearly 80% of landowners, this reliance on numerical majority leaves a significant minority uncompensated, without any adjustment for delay or inflation. By leaving such crucial terms undefined, the law makes it easier to close files than to resolve grievances.

Secondly, the Act draws a temporal cut-off. This leaves land acquisition initiated between 2009 and 2013 in a legal grey zone, where affected landowners are denied the benefits of lapse or enhanced safeguards despite facing the same problems. Even though villagers in Pirpainti face the same delays, disputes, and uncertainty as those covered by stronger protections, their suffering has been routinely justified on the ground that the acquisition began around 2010, placing it within the legal grey zone created by the Act’s timelines. By tying relief to a rigid timeline rather than the actual lived experience of dispossession, the Act leaves many landowners in a legal limbo through no fault of their own.  

Furthermore, these shortcomings are exacerbated by the absence of any clear enforcement mechanism or penalty for non-compliance. When compensation is disputed or delayed, the onus of pursuing redressal falls disproportionately on the landowners, who lack the resources and time to navigate protracted administrative processes. If people are left with no option but to protest publicly as the only visible way to demand recognition, then a law that was meant to reduce conflict, clearly ends up producing it, as it offers rights without the means to enforce them.

Critics of this view often argue that the temporal cut-off was necessary to prevent the reopening of every historical acquisition case, which is administratively unworkable. This is not without merit. However, the choice doesn’t need to be between reopening cases entirely and not offering any relief whatsoever. Targeted measures such as inflation adjusted compensation, compliance reviews and time bound payment audits for such acquisitions could strike a fine balance between administrative feasibility and the Act’s promise of justice. 

It is time for India’s land acquisition process to move beyond the appearance of fairness and deliver it in practice. This requires clearer definitions of terms like ‘majority’ and ‘payment’ to prevent exclusion through numerical compliance, addressing the temporal grey zone, and strengthening enforceable grievance mechanisms with penalties and time-bound state obligations, so affected communities are not pushed into protest as their only recourse.

In conclusion, India’s land acquisition framework does need to be revamped. LARR 2013 needs to move beyond symbolic reform and has to be bolstered with safeguards that actually work for people, not just processes. Without these changes, the law will continue to reward technical compliance while marginalised landowners will be left to bear the costs of dispossession. A land acquisition regime that truly centres people would not slow development, rather, it would give it legitimacy.