Compensation For Public Purpose Land Acquisition In India.

Abstract

Indian Economy has crossed the mark of 2 trillion dollars and is annually growing at approximately 6 per cent. However, the fact is that about 69 percent of Indian population live in rural areas where people mainly depend on land and land based activities. A fact that emerged in a recent socio economic survey by the government is that landlessness is the best indicator of poverty compared to any other socio-economic factors. The government has even considered this factor to be a major indicator of the rural poverty. It is in this context that right to land gains importance. No form of sustainable development can be achieved without addressing the issue of land rights and equitable distribution of the benefits arising from land to the last mile stakeholder. One of the major challenges to the current development model is the authority of the state to acquire private property for public purposes. This power does yield benefit to the society at large by engaging land in large scale developmental activities, the concern is such development shall soon fall flat on the burials of the small scale and rural land owners grounding it. The issue of compensation is of prime concern when it comes to providing justice to the land owners for the land acquired. The vague terminology in the laws and ample scope for judicial interpretation together has done more damage than providing justice to the stakeholders. The outcome of such damage is increased litigation on the issue of compensation and halt of major developmental projects due to non-availability of land. This study explores the factors that significantly affect the compensation awarded by the judiciary by systematically analysing the judgements on the issue of compensation and recommends alternate methods to reduce the litigation over compensation in public purpose land acquisition in Indian context.