Every argument about Indian land acquisition law eventually becomes an argument about two statutes: the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, Act 1 of 1894, which governed the taking of land for well over a century, and the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, Act 30 of 2013, which repealed it and took its place from 1 January 2014. The argument is usually conducted by slogan. One side says the new Act pays four times the market value and asks what more a landowner could want. The other side says the new Act made land impossible to acquire and asks what more an investor could fear. Both slogans describe the same statute, and both are wrong in the same way: each takes one feature of the 2013 settlement, prices it at its maximum, and treats the result as the whole.

This comparison proceeds differently. It sets the two statutes side by side across the twelve dimensions that decide what happens to a person whose land is taken, it runs one identical parcel of land through both compensation codes so that the money difference is a matter of arithmetic rather than adjectives, and it then asks the harder question the slogans avoid: whether the better statute actually governed the acquisitions that happened after it was passed. The verdict defended here is the one the brief for this article names, and the evidence supports it. On every dimension that can be compared, the 2013 Act treats the person losing land more generously than its predecessor did. The observable consequence, however, was that acquisition migrated toward the routes the 2013 Act did not reach: the exempted special statutes, direct purchase outside acquisition altogether, land pooling, and State amendments that recreated the exemptions the Centre had failed to enact. The reform improved the terms of acquisition and reduced the share of acquisition conducted on those terms. That is the phenomenon of diversion, and it is the deciding factor in this comparison, because a landowner’s real position depends not on which statute is kinder in the abstract but on which statute governs his field.

Land Acquisition Act 1894 vs 2013: the decision this comparison has to make

A comparison article earns its length only if somebody is stuck on the distinction it draws, and three distinct readers are stuck on this one. The first is the landowner, or the family, or the adviser, holding a notice, an award, or a half-remembered grievance, and asking the most practical question in Indian property law: which of these two statutes governs my land, and what difference does the answer make to what my family receives and to what we can refuse? The second is the legislator, the staffer, or the administrator designing the next protective statute in a federal system, who needs to know why a law that was plainly better on paper produced a contested record in practice, because the lesson generalises to every field in which the Centre legislates a floor and the States administer the ground beneath it. The third is the aspirant, for whom the land acquisition comparison is directly examinable and routinely answered with the slogans this article is written against.

The options between which these readers must decide are not, despite the slogans, acquire under the old law or acquire under the new one. The 1894 Act is repealed; no acquiring body may choose it for a fresh taking, and no landowner may demand it. The live options are subtler. For an acquisition already in motion when the new Act commenced, the choice is made by the savings provision, and the practical task is to identify which regime the file falls under and whether the new Act’s compensation code reaches into the old proceeding. For a project not yet begun, the real choice sits with the acquiring body, and it is a choice among routes: acquisition under the general Act with its full discipline, acquisition under one of the special statutes that stood outside that discipline, negotiated purchase that is not acquisition at all, or a pooling scheme in which the owner contributes land and takes back developed plots. The landowner does not make that choice, but the landowner lives with its consequences, which is why a comparison that stops at the two statutes’ texts misses the decision that matters.

The method of what follows should be stated plainly. Each dimension of the comparison is tested against the statutory text and the verified record of the two owner articles in this series, and where the two Acts use the same word for different things, or different words for the same thing, the difference is named rather than smoothed over. Where a proposition is contested, the strongest form of each side is given in its own voice and attributed to the people who actually made it. And the verdict, when it comes, is a verdict about the person’s position, not about the statutes’ reputations: the question is never which Act is praised more, but what a family in a named situation receives, may refuse, may challenge, and may wait for, under each.

The two statutes in brief

The older statute is treated in full in the pillar account of the Land Acquisition Act 1894, and only its skeleton is needed here. The Act of 1894 was a procedural code for a single transaction: the state decides that land is needed for a public purpose or for a company, notifies the land, hears the owner’s objection to the taking itself, declares the need conclusively, enquires into claims, makes an award of money, and takes possession, whereupon the land vests in the government free from all encumbrances. The owner was heard, under Section 5A, on whether the land should be taken at all; he was compensated, under Section 23, for what the land was worth on the day the process began; and if he disputed the price his remedy was a reference under Section 18 to the ordinary civil court, which reheard the valuation question. Nothing else in the transaction belonged to him. The Act contained no rehabilitation, no consent, no study of the acquisition’s social cost, no obligation to return land left unused, and no share for the owner in any later gain when the land was sold on. Its definition of the person entitled to be paid, the person interested, was anchored in title: the Act saw owners, and those with legal interests in the land, and it did not see the tenant, the sharecropper, or the labourer whose livelihood the taking destroyed but whose name appeared in no record.

The newer statute is treated in full in the pillar account of the LARR Act 2013, and its skeleton is the deliberate negation of the older one’s, point by point. The Act of 2013, which received the assent of the President on 26 September 2013 and came into force on 1 January 2014, defines public purpose by enumeration rather than leaving it to the acquiring government’s assertion. It requires, before acquisition, a Social Impact Assessment conducted under Sections 4 to 9 and appraised by an independent Expert Group. It requires, where the government acquires for a private company or for a public private partnership project, the prior consent of a stated proportion of affected families. It computes compensation under Sections 26 to 30 by a prescribed method rather than by the Collector’s assessment of a frozen date, multiplies rural market value by a factor from the First Schedule, and adds a solatium of one hundred per cent. It attaches to every acquisition a rehabilitation and resettlement award under Section 31, owed to affected families defined widely enough to include families who own nothing. And it sends disputes not to the ordinary civil court but to a dedicated Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Authority established under Section 51. The two statutes are therefore not two versions of one design. They are two answers to two different questions: the older Act answers the question how the state takes land in good order, and the newer Act answers the question what the state owes the people from whom land is taken.

How long did the 1894 Act remain in force?

The 1894 Act commenced on 1 March 1894 and was repealed with effect from 1 January 2014, when the Act of 2013 came into force, a working life of one hundred and nineteen years, governing acquisition through the colonial period, the freedom movement, the dam and steel plant decades of the planned economy, and liberalisation.

It survived every one of those transformations, and the land conflicts of the special economic zone era after them, with its basic structure intact and its money terms repriced only once, in 1984.

That longevity is itself evidence in the comparison, and it cuts in two directions. The defence of the old Act begins here: a statute that administered the acquisition of land for railways, canals, cantonments, dams, industrial estates and cities across three centuries’ turn, under governments of every description, cannot have been unworkable, and its procedures were understood by every Collector, every court and every acquiring department in the country. The case against it answers that survival is not the same as consent: the Act lasted because the people it governed had no route around it, and its final decades were marked not by acceptance but by an accumulating record of acquisition conflicts, at Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal and at the POSCO site in Odisha among others, in which the dispute was never about the rate of compensation and always about the settlement the Act embodied, that the state could decide, value and take with the owner heard only on price. A statute can be administratively excellent and politically finished at the same time, and the Act of 1894, by the time Parliament replaced it, was both.

One further feature of the older Act’s long life matters for the comparison, because it explains what the 2013 Parliament thought it was doing. The Act was amended in 1984, by the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Act 1984, Act 68 of 1984, in force from 24 September 1984, and that amendment repriced the statute without redesigning it: the solatium rose from fifteen per cent of market value to thirty per cent, a new Section 23(1A) added an additional amount of twelve per cent per annum on market value for the interval the process consumed, interest on delayed payment rose, and Section 11A imposed a two-year deadline for the award on pain of lapse. The 1984 Parliament, in other words, accepted the 1894 design and adjusted its figures. The 2013 Parliament did the opposite: it kept almost none of the design, because the failures it was answering, the absence of consent, the absence of rehabilitation, the invisibility of the title less, were features of the design and could not be reached by adjusting figures inside it. Whether replacement rather than amendment was the right instrument is one of the questions this comparison must answer, and it is taken up directly below.

The genuine points of difference: power and voice

The first group of differences concerns who decides, and who is heard before the decision hardens. Under the Act of 1894, the acquiring government decided everything that mattered and the landowner was heard on almost nothing that mattered. The Act nowhere defined public purpose. The government’s declaration under Section 6 that land was needed for a public purpose was declared by the statute to be conclusive evidence of that need, and across a century of litigation the courts treated the stated purpose as close to unreviewable: challenges succeeded on procedure, on notice, on the conduct of the hearing, and almost never on the proposition that the purpose was not public. The single hearing the Act gave the owner, under Section 5A, allowed an objection to the acquisition itself, filed within thirty days of the notification, heard by the Collector, and reported to the government, whose decision was final and which was, in the ordinary case, the same government that had sanctioned the project. The hearing was real but thin, and the urgency power described below could delete it altogether.

The Act of 2013 attacks the same problem at three different points, because its drafters had concluded from the century’s record that a purpose test applied by deferential courts after the event was no test at all. The first attack is definitional. Section 2(1) defines public purpose by enumeration: strategic and defence purposes, infrastructure projects with the express exclusion of private hospitals, private educational institutions and private hotels, projects for agriculture and allied activities under public ownership, industrial corridors and projects under the National Manufacturing Policy including mining, water harvesting and conservation structures, government aided educational and research institutions, planned development, and residential projects for the poor, the landless, persons in areas hit by natural calamity and persons displaced by government schemes. A purpose outside the list is not a public purpose under the Act at all. The list is wide, and this article does not pretend otherwise; mining enters through the manufacturing head and industrial corridors enter by name. But a closed list differs from an open assertion in the one way that counts legally, because an acquiring body that cannot locate its project inside the enumeration has no power to proceed, and the locating can be examined.

The second attack is procedural, and it is the Social Impact Assessment. Under Sections 4 to 9 of the Act of 2013, no acquisition may begin until a study has estimated the families affected and displaced, examined whether the land proposed is the bare minimum the project requires and whether alternatives were considered, assessed the social costs of the acquisition against its benefits, and prepared a Social Impact Management Plan. The study involves a public hearing in the affected area, its report is published, and an independent Expert Group appraised under Section 7 may recommend that the project be abandoned. The contrast with the older Act is not that the old process was quicker, although it was; it is that the old process contained no point at which anybody was required to ask whether the acquisition should happen at all. The Section 5A hearing asked the owner to object; the assessment asks the state to justify, on a record, before the taking, and the justification is published to the people it concerns. The third attack is consent, and it is the one most often misstated. The proviso to Section 2(2) requires the prior consent of at least eighty per cent of affected families where the government acquires land for a private company for a public purpose, and of at least seventy per cent where it acquires for a public private partnership project in which ownership continues to vest in the government. Where the government acquires for its own use, hold and control, including for public sector undertakings, the Act requires no consent from anyone. The most repeated sentence about the Act of 2013, that land cannot be acquired without the consent of seventy or eighty per cent of its owners, is therefore true only when the government acquires for somebody else, and any comparison that repeats it without that qualification has failed at the first dimension.

Consent under the Act of 2013 is also narrower in its electorate than its reputation suggests, and a comparison article should record the narrowing because the owner articles establish it. The families whose consent counts are the proprietary families within the definition of affected family, and the tenants, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers whose livelihoods the acquisition destroys, although owed the rehabilitation package in full, are not counted toward the percentage. The Act’s most celebrated protection is thus held by the class that holds title, while the class the Act elsewhere celebrates most, the livelihood loser without title, receives entitlements but no vote. That is a genuine design criticism, made from within the Act’s own premises, and it qualifies, without reversing, the verdict on the consent dimension: against an older Act that asked nobody anything, a consent requirement confined to two routes and to titled families is still a large change, and it is a smaller one than the slogans claim.

Alongside the three attacks sits a protection with no counterpart in the older Act at all. Section 41 of the Act of 2013 provides that as far as possible no acquisition shall be made in the Scheduled Areas, that where it proceeds it must be demonstrably a last resort, and that in all cases, including acquisition by the government for itself, the prior consent of the concerned Gram Sabha, Panchayat or autonomous District Council must be obtained. This is the one place in the Act where consent is not keyed to the identity of the acquirer, and it converts the consent principle from a condition on private benefit into a condition on taking tribal land at all. The older Act contained nothing of the kind; a Scheduled Area under the Act of 1894 was simply land, notified and taken like any other.

The urgency power shows the same two statutes at their furthest apart in spirit, because it is the point where each Act reveals what it thinks an emergency is. Section 17 of the Act of 1894 allowed the government, in cases of urgency as it characterised them, to dispense with the Section 5A hearing altogether and to take possession fifteen days after the Section 9 notice, before any award had fixed what the land was worth. Over the decades the power became a routine administrative convenience, invoked for industrial estates and housing projects whose urgency consisted in the acquiring body’s wish for speed, because the clause priced itself at nothing and the choice of mode lay wholly with the taker. Section 40 of the Act of 2013 keeps an urgency power and cages it. Possession may be taken thirty days after the Section 21 notice and before award only for the minimum area required for the defence of India or national security, or for emergencies arising out of natural calamities, or for another emergency with the approval of Parliament. Eighty per cent of the estimated compensation must be tendered before possession, and an additional compensation of seventy five per cent of the total compensation is payable, except in the class of projects affecting sovereignty, security or foreign relations. The comparison is not between a power and its absence. It is between a power the taker could invoke for its own convenience at no cost, and a power confined to named emergencies, fenced with a proportionality limit the courts can grip, and priced so that using it costs the acquiring body money. On this dimension the newer Act is not marginally better; it is better in kind.

The genuine points of difference: money, repair and discipline

The second group of differences concerns what the loser receives and what disciplines the taker afterwards. Begin with the base figure, because everything else multiplies from it. Under Section 23 of the Act of 1894, compensation rested on the market value of the land at the date of the Section 4 notification, the day the process began. The choice of date was defensible in design: it prevented speculation after announcement from inflating the bill, and it prevented the acquiring body from profiting by delay. In operation it was the old Act’s deepest defect, because the notification itself announced a project that would raise surrounding prices while freezing the acquired parcel’s price at yesterday’s figure, and the market value was in practice proved from registered sale deeds in an economy where deed values systematically understated the prices actually paid. Additions sat on top of the frozen base: damage for standing crops and trees, severance damage to land retained, injurious affection to other property or earnings, reasonable expenses of a compelled change of residence or business, and loss of profits in the interval. An additional amount of twelve per cent per annum on the market value ran under Section 23(1A) from notification to award or possession, a crude indexation for the freeze, and a solatium was paid in consideration of the compulsory nature of the acquisition, fifteen per cent of market value as enacted and thirty per cent after the amendment of 1984. Interest under Sections 28 and 34, at nine per cent for the first year after possession and fifteen per cent thereafter in the amended Act, priced the state’s delay in paying.

The Act of 2013 rebuilds the base before it multiplies it, and the rebuilding is the part of the compensation reform that the four times slogan obscures. Section 26 requires the Collector to adopt the highest of three measures: the market value specified for registration under the Indian Stamp Act 1899 in the area, the average sale price for similar land in the nearest village or vicinity computed, under the section’s Explanations, across the higher half of the sale deeds of the preceding three years, and, where land is acquired for a private company or a partnership project, the amount agreed in the consent process. Taking the higher half of the deeds alone corrects the single largest downward bias in the old practice, because an average across all deeds let the cheapest transactions, including the understated ones, drag the figure down. The date discipline is retained; market value is determined as on the date of the preliminary notification under Section 11, and later movements are excluded on both sides. What changes is which evidence of value the statute trusts, and the change is from the Collector’s assessment of a frozen record to a prescribed comparison the Collector is not free to shortcut.

On top of the rebuilt base, the Act of 2013 applies the two operations the slogans are made of. Section 26(2) directs that market value be multiplied by the factor specified in the First Schedule: for rural areas a factor between 1.00 and 2.00 graded by distance from an urban area as the appropriate government notifies, the Centre having notified the maximum of 2.00 for its own acquisitions, and for urban areas a factor of one. The value of assets attached to the land is then added, and Section 30(1) imposes a solatium of one hundred per cent of the resulting compensation amount, so the assembled figure is doubled. Section 30(3) adds twelve per cent per annum on the market value, computed before multiplication, for the period from the publication of the Social Impact Assessment notification until the award or the taking of possession, whichever is earlier. The mechanism differs from the old Act’s at every step: the old solatium was thirty per cent of market value alone, while the new solatium is one hundred per cent of market value as multiplied plus assets; the old twelve per cent ran from a notification that began the taking, while the new twelve per cent runs from a notification that begins the study, so administrative delay before the acquisition proper is priced into the bill as well. The worked parcel below prices both codes on identical facts.

Rehabilitation is not a difference of degree at all, and the comparison should say so without qualification. The Act of 1894 contained no rehabilitation provision of any kind: a family displaced by an acquisition received its share of the compensation if it held an interest in the land, and nothing if it did not, and the state’s obligation ended at the treasury door. The Act of 2013 makes a rehabilitation and resettlement award under Section 31 a component of every acquisition, computed on the Second Schedule’s elements and owed to affected families, a term Section 3(c) defines to include landless agricultural labourers, tenants, sharecroppers and artisans who worked in the affected area for three years before the acquisition and whose primary livelihood is destroyed by it, together with forest dwellers and others whose subsistence the records never captured. The Schedule’s elements map, one by one, onto the documented ways displaced families were impoverished under the cash only regime: a house for the family that loses its dwelling, land for land in the command area of irrigation and hydel projects, a choice for each family between employment at not less than the minimum wage, a one time payment of five lakh rupees, or an annuity of not less than two thousand rupees a month for twenty years indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labourers, a subsistence grant of three thousand rupees a month for the year after the award, and one time grants for transport, resettlement, cattle sheds, petty shops and artisans, with the Third Schedule prescribing the amenities of the resettlement area itself. The older Act’s silence on all of this is the single largest gap between the two statutes, larger than any figure in the compensation code, because compensation prices the asset while rehabilitation addresses the life.

Three closing differences complete the survey before the table states them side by side. The food security safeguard in Section 10 of the Act of 2013 provides that no irrigated multi-cropped land shall be acquired save in exceptional circumstances as a demonstrable last resort, within aggregate limits the appropriate government notifies, and with an obligation to develop an equivalent area of culturable wasteland or deposit its value for investment in agriculture; the Centre notified a limit of one per cent of a district’s irrigated multi-cropped land over a five year block for its own projects, and linear projects such as railways and highways stand outside the section. The Act of 1894 had no category of land it treated as too valuable as food to take. The dispute forum changed in kind: the old Act sent the dissatisfied owner by Section 18 reference to the ordinary civil court, a forum of general jurisdiction working through the ordinary civil list, while the Act of 2013 sends objections by Section 64 reference to the dedicated Authority, which under Section 69 must audit the award against the parameters of Sections 26 to 30, with an appeal under Section 74 to the High Court. And time discipline, which the old Act possessed only in part, the new Act generalises: the old Act’s Section 11A required the award within two years of the declaration on pain of lapse and its Section 6 proviso barred a declaration more than three years after notification, while the Act of 2013 requires the Collector’s award within twelve months of the declaration under Section 19 on pain of lapse under Section 25, prices delay continuously through the twelve per cent addition, and adds two aftercare rules the old Act never contained, the return of land left unutilised for five years under Section 101 and the sharing of forty per cent of the appreciated value with the original owners where acquired land is transferred without development within five years under Section 102.

What is a land bank, and why does the 2013 Act provide for one?

A land bank, in the usage of Section 101 of the Act of 2013, is the pool of land held by the appropriate government from acquisitions, to which acquired land that remains unutilised for five years from the taking of possession may be sent instead of being returned to its original owners or their heirs.

The section gives the government the choice between return and the bank, and the choice matters, because return restores the family while the bank keeps the land inside the state’s inventory for other projects.

The provision exists because the older Act’s silence on unused land was one of its most resented features: land taken for a stated purpose could lie idle for decades, be diverted to a different purpose, or be transferred onward at appreciated values, and the original owner watched each outcome from outside the fence with no statutory claim on any of it. Section 101 does not give the owner a right to demand the land back, and a comparison should not dress it as one; the government specifies whether unutilised land returns or goes to the bank. What the section changes is the acquirer’s incentive and the owner’s standing to complain: land taken and left idle no longer simply stays with the body that took it as a costless asset, and the five year clock is a fact a court, an auditor, or a family can point to. Section 102 works the same side of the street from the other direction, converting the grievance of land taken cheaply and sold dear into a forty per cent share of the appreciation on the first transfer without development. Neither provision existed in any form in the Act of 1894.

The two procedures walked through, from first notice to possession

Dimensions compare provisions; a landowner experiences a sequence, and the sequences differ as much as the provisions do. Walk the ordinary, non urgent acquisition through each Act and the difference in texture becomes plain. Under the Act of 1894 the sequence opened with the Section 4 notification, published in the Gazette and in newspapers and posted in the locality, announcing that land in a named place was likely to be needed for a public purpose and authorising survey and entry. From that publication the price of every notified parcel froze for compensation purposes. The owner then had thirty days to file objections under Section 5A, directed at the taking itself; the Collector heard them and reported to the government, whose decision was final. The Section 6 declaration followed, conclusive that the land was needed, and it had to come within three years of the notification. Notices under Section 9 invited claims from persons interested, the Collector conducted his enquiry into value and claims, and the award under Section 11 stated the compensation; Section 11A required that award within two years of the declaration, on pain of the whole proceeding lapsing. On the award, or on the urgency track before it, the Collector took possession under Section 16 and the land vested in the government free from all encumbrances. The owner’s post award life was the Section 18 reference if he disputed the price, prosecuted in the civil court while the project proceeded on his land. Count the points in that sequence at which the owner could affect anything other than price: one, the objection, decided by the acquiring government itself.

Under the Act of 2013 the sequence is longer because it has a front end the old sequence never possessed. It opens not with the acquisition but with the Social Impact Assessment: the study is notified, conducted with a public hearing in the affected area, and published, and the independent Expert Group appraises whether the project serves its stated purpose, whether the land sought is the bare minimum, and whether the social costs are justified, with power to recommend abandonment. Where the route requires consent, the consent of the families is obtained alongside the study and ascertained by the government before it proceeds. Only then does the preliminary notification under Section 11 issue, beginning the acquisition proper: a census and survey of affected families by the Administrator, objections under Section 15, the preparation of the rehabilitation and resettlement scheme, the declaration under Section 19, the enquiry, and the Collector’s award under Section 30, which Section 25 requires within twelve months of the declaration on pain of lapse, accompanied by the separate rehabilitation award under Section 31. Possession follows only after the compensation has been tendered and the rehabilitation entitlements arranged, and the land vests on possession. Count the points at which persons other than the acquiring department can affect the outcome: the hearing inside the study, the appraisal that can recommend abandonment, the consent vote on two routes, the objections, the scheme’s preparation in consultation, and the reference to a specialist Authority afterwards. The new sequence is slower for the same reason a trial is slower than an executive order, and the comparison of the two sequences is the comparison of the two Acts in miniature: the old one is a funnel narrowing toward possession, the new one is a series of gates, each of which somebody other than the taker holds a key to.

Two features of the walked sequences deserve emphasis because summaries routinely lose them. The first is where possession sits. In the old Act’s design, possession is the hinge of the whole proceeding and everything after it is money; the vesting on possession is absolute and free from encumbrances, so the owner’s land is gone in law from that moment whatever the reference later decides about its price. In the new Act’s design, possession is pushed to the end of a completed front end and is conditioned on tender of compensation, so the family’s dispossession and the state’s payment are made near simultaneous by structure rather than by grace. The second feature is the position of the award. Under the old Act the award was the Collector’s assessment, informed by his enquiry and correctable only by litigation; under the new Act the award is a computation whose components the statute prescribes and whose errors are demonstrable arithmetically, which changes the character of the dispute that follows it, from an argument about what land is worth to an audit of whether the formula was followed. A procedure is a theory of the parties rendered as a sequence of steps, and by that test the two procedures are not the same theory at different speeds. They are different theories.

The twelve-dimension comparison with a landowner column

The table below states the comparison in the form this article’s brief prescribes: the two statutes across the twelve dimensions that decide the loser’s position, with a final column translating each difference into what it means for the person whose land is being taken. Every row of it has been stated in prose above or is stated in the sections that follow, and the multiplier and solatium rows in particular are priced on an identical parcel in the worked example that follows the table.

Dimension	The Act of 1894	The Act of 2013	What it means for the person losing land
Who may acquire, and for what	The appropriate government, for a public purpose or for a company	The appropriate government, for its own use, for public private partnership projects, or for private companies, for purposes within the statutory list	The beneficiary of the taking is identified and classified at the outset, and the classification decides which protections apply
The public purpose test	Public purpose nowhere defined; the Section 6 declaration is conclusive evidence of need	Public purpose defined by enumeration in Section 2(1), with private hospitals, private educational institutions and private hotels expressly excluded from the infrastructure head	A purpose outside the list cannot be dressed as public, and the locating of the project inside the list can be examined
Study before acquisition	None of any kind	A Social Impact Assessment under Sections 4 to 9, with a public hearing, publication, and appraisal by an independent Expert Group that may recommend abandonment	The state must justify the taking, and show the land is the bare minimum, on a published record before the taking begins
Consent of affected families	Not required at any stage, for any acquirer	Prior consent of at least 80 per cent of affected families for acquisition for private companies, and 70 per cent for public private partnership projects; none where the government acquires for itself	On two of the three routes the owners hold a collective veto; on the government’s own route they hold none
Objection and hearing	A Section 5A objection to the taking itself, heard by the Collector, with the government’s decision final	Objections heard under Section 15 inside a process that also includes the study, the public hearing and the independent appraisal	The owner’s voice moves from a single hearing before the deciding government to one element in a structured front end
The market value base	Market value at the date of the Section 4 notification, proved in practice from registered sale deeds	The highest of the stamp value, the average of the higher half of comparable sale deeds of the preceding three years, and any consented amount, under Section 26	The base figure is produced by a prescribed comparison designed to correct the understatement built into the deed record
Multiplier and solatium	No multiplier; solatium of 30 per cent of market value after the amendment of 1984, and 15 per cent before it	A First Schedule factor of 1.00 to 2.00 in rural areas by distance from an urban area, and 1.00 in urban areas; solatium of 100 per cent of the market value as multiplied plus the value of assets	The headline money difference between the two Acts is produced on this row, and most public argument about the comparison is argument about this row alone
Rehabilitation and resettlement	Nothing; the Act’s obligation ended with payment of compensation to persons interested	A rehabilitation and resettlement award under Section 31 on the Second and Third Schedules, owed to every affected family including families without title	The loss of a livelihood is compensated as well as the loss of an asset, and a family that owns nothing is owed a package rather than nothing
The urgency power	Section 17: possession fifteen days after notice, the objection hearing dispensable, for any purpose the government characterised as urgent	Section 40: confined to defence, national security and emergencies from natural calamities, or another emergency approved by Parliament; eighty per cent of estimated compensation tendered before possession; seventy five per cent additional compensation in the ordinary case	Emergency speed survives for genuine emergencies; the routine fast track for ordinary projects is abolished and its use is priced
Food security	No class of land protected from acquisition	Section 10: irrigated multi-cropped land may be acquired only in exceptional circumstances as a demonstrable last resort, within notified aggregate limits, with an equivalent area of culturable wasteland to be developed	The most fertile land is made the last land the state may reach for, and the reaching is counted in aggregate
The dispute forum	A Section 18 reference to the ordinary civil court, which reheard the valuation	A Section 64 reference to the dedicated Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Authority, which audits the award against the statutory parameters, with an appeal to the High Court under Section 74	The dispute is heard by a specialist body against a checklist written into the statute, on a strict timetable
Time discipline and aftercare	The award within two years of the declaration under Section 11A or the proceedings lapse; nothing on land left unused or sold on	The award within twelve months of the declaration under Section 19 or the proceedings lapse under Section 25; land unutilised for five years returned or sent to the land bank under Section 101; forty per cent of the appreciated value shared on an early resale under Section 102	Delay is priced continuously against the acquiring body, idle land carries a clock, and the original owner participates in a windfall the project did not earn

Read the table by its columns rather than by its rows and a pattern emerges that no single row discloses. The 1894 column is the record of a statute that trusted the acquiring government at every decision point: the government asserted the purpose, heard the objection, valued the land on its own officer’s enquiry, chose whether urgency applied, and kept the land whatever happened afterwards. The 2013 column is the record of a statute that trusted the acquiring government at almost no decision point: the purpose must be found in a list, the taking must survive a published study and an independent appraisal, the owners must consent on the routes where a private beneficiary waits, the value must be computed by a prescribed comparison and doubled, the displaced must be rebuilt, the forum is specialist, the clocks run against the state, and the land itself carries a return ticket if it is not used. The comparison is therefore not between a harsh statute and a generous one, although it is also that. It is between two theories of where error lies in acquisition: the older Act assumed the characteristic error was obstruction, and armed the state against it; the newer Act assumed the characteristic error was undercompensation and dispossession without repair, and armed the loser against those.

Two honest qualifications belong beside the table, because a table flatters the newer statute by its form. The first is that the 2013 column states the law of acquisitions under the 2013 Act, and the share of Indian acquisition that actually proceeds under that Act is the subject of the diversion evidence below; a column can be accurate and still describe a minority of cases. The second is that several entries in the 2013 column are duties whose strength depends on executive follow-through: the food security caps bite only when limits are notified, the rehabilitation package is only as good as the census that counts the affected families and the administration that delivers the Schedule, and the Scheduled Areas consent is a condition whose fulfilment is contested in practice. The entries in the 1894 column, by contrast, were mostly self-executing, because a statute that promises little needs little administration to keep its promises. That asymmetry, between a generous law that must be administered into life and a meagre law that administered itself, runs through everything that follows.

One acre under both Acts: the identical parcel priced twice

Comparisons of compensation codes decay into adjectives unless the same land is run through both, so this section runs one acre through both, on stipulated facts held identical across the two columns so that every difference in the outcome is produced by the statutes and by nothing else. The parcel is one acre of rural agricultural land, taken in its entirety, so no severance question arises. Its market value is ten lakh rupees, and the stipulation is that the figure is the same under both Acts: it is the value the Collector would find for the parcel on the old Act’s enquiry at the notification date, and it is also, to isolate the formulas, the figure that emerges as the highest of the three measures under Section 26 of the new Act. The assets attached to the land, a well, standing trees and a small structure, are valued at one lakh rupees under both codes. The process takes two years from the opening notification to the award under each Act, so the twelve per cent addition runs for the same period in both columns. Interest for delayed payment is excluded from both, because it is contingent in both. Rehabilitation is excluded from the money totals in both, because the old Act has none and the new Act’s package, which would come on top of its money total, is stated separately below. The full mechanics of the new Act’s computation, step by step, are owned by the article on LARR compensation and consent rules, which also owns the lapse position; what belongs here is the same parcel priced by the two codes side by side.

Under the Act of 1894 the computation is short. The market value is ten lakh rupees. The damage for the assets taken, the well, the trees and the structure, adds one lakh rupees under the heads of Section 23, bringing the subtotal to eleven lakh rupees. The additional amount under Section 23(1A) is twelve per cent per annum on the market value of ten lakh rupees for the two years the process consumed, which is two lakh forty thousand rupees. The solatium under Section 23(2), at the post 1984 rate of thirty per cent of the market value, is three lakh rupees. The award is therefore sixteen lakh forty thousand rupees, for land whose stipulated market value was ten lakh: one and sixty four hundredths times the market value, a figure worth remembering when the new Act’s multiples are quoted, because the old Act was never paying bare market value either.

Under the Act of 2013 the same parcel, in a rural area for which the maximum factor of two has been notified, computes as follows. The market value under Section 26 is ten lakh rupees by stipulation. Section 26(2) multiplies it by the First Schedule factor of 2.00, producing twenty lakh rupees. The value of the assets, one lakh rupees, is added, producing a compensation amount of twenty one lakh rupees. Section 30(1) then imposes a solatium of one hundred per cent of that amount, a further twenty one lakh rupees, producing a final award of forty two lakh rupees. Section 30(3) adds twelve per cent per annum on the market value of ten lakh rupees for the two years from the publication of the Social Impact Assessment notification to the award, a further two lakh forty thousand rupees. The total is forty four lakh forty thousand rupees, which is two and seven tenths times what the same parcel fetched under the old Act on the same facts, and four and forty four hundredths times its market value. Separately, and outside that total, the family is owed the rehabilitation package: a house if displaced, and the choice between employment, a one time payment of five lakh rupees, or the indexed annuity, with the subsistence and one time grants around it. The money comparison understates the full difference between the regimes, because the old column’s total is everything the family would ever receive, while the new column’s total is only the compensation half of its entitlement.

Vary the one figure the acquiring State controls. If the appropriate government has notified the minimum rural factor of 1.00 for the area, the new Act’s computation changes at a single step and the change propagates: the multiplied value is ten lakh rupees, the assets bring the compensation amount to eleven lakh, the solatium adds eleven lakh, the award is twenty two lakh, and the twelve per cent addition, unchanged because it is computed on the unmultiplied market value, brings the total to twenty four lakh forty thousand rupees. That is just under one and a half times the old Act’s figure for the same parcel. The urban parcel computes identically to the minimum factor rural parcel, because the urban factor is fixed at one. The spread between the two new Act outcomes, twenty four lakh forty thousand and forty four lakh forty thousand, is produced entirely by a figure set in a government notification the landowner may never have seen, which is why the first document to demand after any award under the new Act is the factor notification it applies, and why every statement of the form that the 2013 Act pays a fixed multiple of value is false before it is anything else.

The four times slogan can be priced exactly. Four times the market value is reached, on this parcel, by one component alone: the land’s value of ten lakh, multiplied by the maximum factor of two and then doubled by the hundred per cent solatium, gives forty lakh. The slogan takes the ceiling of that single component, at the maximum notified factor, on the rural side of the line, and presents it as the Act’s general output. It omits that the factor is a State’s choice within a band and sits at one in much of the country’s working practice and in every urban case; it omits that the base being multiplied is a defined market value which the registration record may have understated, so that four times a depressed base can be less than twice an honest one; and it omits the comparison that actually matters to the family, which is not the multiple of market value but the multiple of what the old law would have paid, which on these identical facts is two and seven tenths at the maximum factor and under one and a half at the minimum. The industry warning issued when the bill passed, by Kris Gopalakrishnan, then President of the Confederation of Indian Industry, that the cost of land acquisition was likely to increase three to three and a half times, sits between those two figures, and the arithmetic of this parcel suggests it was a reasonable estimate for rural acquisition at high notified factors and an overstatement as a national average. Both the slogan and the warning are best understood as statements about the maximum factor case, generalised.

Whose loss counts: the person interested and the affected family

One difference between the two Acts is so fundamental that the table can only gesture at it, and it deserves a section of its own, because it determines who appears in the comparison at all. The Act of 1894 organised its entire scheme around the person interested, the holder of a legal interest in the land acquired: the owner, the mortgagee, the lessee, the holder of an easement. Compensation was apportioned among such persons according to their interests, and the Act’s solicitude, such as it was, ran to them. The definition was coherent on its own premise, that acquisition takes property and the state pays for what it takes. The premise was the problem. An acquisition takes a field and, with it, the tenancy of the family that cultivated the field under an oral arrangement, the seasonal work of the labourers who lived by its harvests, the trade of the artisan whose customers the village supplied, and the commons on which the landless grazed and gathered. None of that appeared in the record of title, and so none of it appeared in the old Act’s accounting. The displaced of the dam decades who fill the literature of Indian development protest are, in the old statute’s own terms, largely people to whom nothing legally happened.

The Act of 2013 replaces the organising concept. Its unit is the affected family, defined in Section 3(c) to include the family whose land or other immovable property is acquired; landless agricultural labourers, tenants, sharecroppers and artisans who worked in the affected area for three years before the acquisition and whose primary source of livelihood stands affected; Scheduled Tribe and other traditional forest dwellers who lose forest rights recognised under the forest rights legislation; families whose primary livelihood for three years has depended on forests or water bodies, including gatherers, hunters, fisher folk and those tending livestock; and families assigned land by the government whose assigned holdings are acquired. The definition is doing deliberate work. It detaches entitlement from title, attaches it to affectedness, and fixes the three year qualifying period as the test of a livelihood’s reality. Everything distinctive in the new Act flows through this gateway: the census counts affected families, the consent percentages are computed on them in their proprietary sub class, the rehabilitation award is made to them, and the resettlement area is built for them. The older Act’s organising concept answered the question whose property is this; the newer Act’s answers the question whose life does this taking rearrange, and the second question has a much longer answer.

The comparison should also record where the new concept strains, because it strains exactly at its point of greatest novelty. A title is a fact the record states; a livelihood is a fact somebody must find. The three year test for the title less depends on evidence that oral tenancies and seasonal labour arrangements rarely generate, and the census that applies the test is conducted by the administration whose acquisition the counting makes more expensive, an incentive structure the Act’s supporters and critics read in opposite ways. The consent design draws a further line inside the definition itself: the families counted toward the eighty and seventy per cent thresholds are the proprietary families, so the title less loser is a beneficiary of the Act’s generosity and a stranger to its democracy. And the definition’s generosity has a boundary the debate often misses, which is that it is a definition for acquisition: the family whose livelihood is destroyed by a negotiated purchase below the Section 46 threshold, or by a pooling scheme it declined, stands outside the affected family altogether, because the Act’s concepts attach to its own proceedings and, in the purchase case, only above a notified size. Whose loss counts is therefore the dimension on which the new Act’s advance is greatest and its coverage most visibly incomplete at the same time, and the two halves of that sentence are the comparison in one line.

What survived the repeal: continuity, precedent and the border between the Acts

A repeal does not repeal the case law by itself, and the practically useful part of the judicial comparison is to identify where the old jurisprudence continues to govern under the new Act and where it does not. The rule of thumb the courts have worked with follows the texts. Where the Act of 2013 reproduces the older Act in substance, the learning under the older provision travels with it: the principles for assessing market value from comparable instances, the treatment of severance and injurious affection, which the new Act carries into its own parameters in Section 28 in terms close to the old Section 23 heads, and the accumulated doctrine on interest and on the conduct of references, all continue to be cited and applied because the questions they answer are the same questions in the same words. Where the new Act changes the substance, the old learning stops at the border: the conclusiveness of the old declaration has no counterpart to attach to, the jurisprudence of the urgency clause addresses a power the new Act has caged beyond recognition, and the entire body of authority on what the Collector’s award must contain is superseded by a code that prescribes the computation the award must show. A practitioner who cites an 1894 Act authority under the new Act without first asking whether the provision it construed survived is making the characteristic error of the transition years, and the error is avoidable by the single discipline of reading the two texts side by side, which is the discipline this comparison exists to supply.

Why did Parliament repeal the 1894 Act instead of amending it once more?

Because the failures were features of the old Act’s design rather than defects in its figures, and a design cannot be amended into its opposite one clause at a time. The 1984 amendment showed the limit: it repriced the solatium, the additional amount and interest, and left the state deciding, valuing and taking with the owner heard only on price.

Consent, rehabilitation and the recognition of the title less loser were not adjustments the 1894 skeleton could carry, because that skeleton defined the loser as the person interested in the land and the transaction as complete on payment.

The drafting history confirms the reasoning, and it is stated in the owner articles and repeated here only in outline. A first attempt in 2007 proceeded by the amendment route, pairing a Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill with a separate Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill; both passed the Lok Sabha in February 2009 and lapsed on its dissolution, and the rehabilitation half of that package attached its benefits only above a threshold of displaced families, a design its successors treated as indefensible. The drafters of 2011 drew the lessons that show in the enacted text: entitlement attaches to every affected family rather than above a threshold, compensation and rehabilitation are fused in a single code so that neither can be amended against the other, and the owner only theory of loss is replaced at the definition stage rather than patched. Replacement also carried a cost that the comparison should record honestly, because it is part of the price of the reform: a repealed Act takes a century of settled administrative practice and judicial gloss into a savings provision with it, and the border litigation described next is the invoice. Whether the invoice was worth paying depends on whether the new design’s gains exceed a transition’s confusion, and on the evidence of the dimensions above, where the gains are structural and the confusion is temporary, this article’s answer is that it was.

The border itself is drawn by Section 24 of the Act of 2013, and the comparison needs its outline because it decides, for any acquisition alive at commencement, which statute governs, which is the highest intent practical question in this entire field. Where proceedings under the Act of 1894 had been initiated but no award under Section 11 of that Act had been made by 1 January 2014, the proceeding does not lapse, but the compensation is determined under the new Act’s code, so the money follows the new law while the file follows the old. Where an award under the old Act had been made, the proceedings continue under the Act of 1894 as if it had not been repealed. Section 24(2) then carves the exception that filled the courts: where an old award was made five years or more before commencement, but physical possession has not been taken or the compensation has not been paid, the proceedings are deemed to have lapsed, and the government may begin afresh under the new Act. The construction of that provision produced the deepest litigation of the transition: the three judge decision in Pune Municipal Corporation v Harakchand Misrimal Solanki in 2014, holding that compensation deposited in the government treasury was not payment and that such proceedings lapsed; the coordinate bench conflict of 2018 in Indore Development Authority v Shailendra; and the Constitution Bench decision in Indore Development Authority v Manoharlal on 6 March 2020, which read the two limbs of the provision conjunctively, so that proceedings lapse only where the authority neither took physical possession nor paid the compensation, held that tender of the amount discharges the payment obligation, that deposit in the treasury does not by itself cause a lapse, and that periods during which a court’s interim order operated are excluded from the five years. A proviso to Section 24(2) adds a repricing route distinct from lapse: where compensation for the majority of land holdings in an old award was never deposited in the beneficiaries’ accounts, all the beneficiaries are entitled to compensation computed under the new Act, without the proceeding itself lapsing. The detail of that machinery, and the forensic sequence a landowner with an old award should follow, belongs to the compensation and consent article already linked above; what the comparison takes from it is the pattern, which is that the new Act’s financial reach into old proceedings proved far wider than its procedural reach, and that a family holding paper from the old regime should ask about both lapse and the proviso before assuming the old figures are final.

What did the courts carry over from the old Act into the new one?

The courts carried over the valuation craft and discarded the deference. The method of building market value from comparable sale instances, the heads of damage for severance and injurious affection, and the discipline of interest survived, because the new Act’s own parameters reproduce the old heads in substance.

The posture did not survive: the conclusive declaration, the near immunity of the stated purpose from review, and the routine tolerance of the urgency shortcut were doctrines attached to provisions the new Act abolished or caged, and they have no provision left to attach to.

One continuity deserves separate statement because it is the exception that tests the rule. The constitutional backdrop did not change at all. The Forty fourth Amendment of 1978 had already removed property from the fundamental rights and left the subject to Article 300A, under which no person may be deprived of property save by authority of law, and the Act of 2013 was enacted, defended and construed inside that settlement, exactly as the Act of 1894 had been for its last thirty five years. The new Act’s protections are therefore statutory from top to bottom: they bind because Parliament enacted them, and they can be removed by the same authority that enacted them, a fact whose consequences appear in the next section, where the protections were in fact removed, route by route and State by State, without the central Act being amended at all.

Three files on the border: the transition in worked form

The border drawn by Section 24 is easier to apply than to state in the abstract, so this section applies it to the three files that between them cover most of the transition’s real caseload, on the same one acre parcel used in the worked example above, with its market value of ten lakh rupees.

The first file is the unfinished proceeding. The Section 4 notification issued under the old Act, objections were heard, the declaration was made, but the Collector had made no award when the Act of 2013 commenced on 1 January 2014. Nothing lapses and nothing restarts: the proceeding continues on its old file, but the family’s compensation is determined under the new Act’s code, so the parcel is priced by the Section 26 comparison, multiplied by the notified factor, given assets, doubled by the hundred per cent solatium and completed with the twelve per cent addition, and the family receives the rehabilitation award the old proceeding never contemplated. The practical transformation is the largest of the three files, because a proceeding the acquiring body had kept alive cheaply for years, in the expectation of an old Act award of sixteen lakh forty thousand rupees on this parcel, became an obligation of forty four lakh forty thousand plus the rehabilitation package at the moment of commencement, and the rush of old Act awards in the months before the line, and the litigation over whether particular awards were in fact made before it, belong to this file’s history.

The second file is the completed award. The Collector made his award under Section 11 of the old Act before commencement, the compensation was paid or duly deposited, and possession was taken. This file simply continues under the Act of 1894 as if it had not been repealed: the old computation governs, the old reference route governs, and the family’s remedies are the remedies of the repealed Act preserved for it by the savings provision. The new Act’s generosity does not reach this file at all, and the contrast with the first file is the arbitrariness every transition carries: two identical parcels, in proceedings that differed only in whether an officer signed an award before a date, are priced by different centuries. The comparison cannot remove that arbitrariness, because every repeal draws its line somewhere, but it can name it, which is what the landowner holding the second file is owed by any honest account.

The third file is the abandoned award, and it is the file Section 24(2) was written for. The award was made five years or more before commencement, but the acquiring body never took physical possession of the land and never paid the compensation in the statutory sense: the classic case is the paper acquisition of an earlier decade, the project shelved, the family still cultivating its field under the shadow of a completed proceeding. After the Constitution Bench decision of 2020, this file lapses only where the state failed on both limbs, possession and payment, with periods of court ordered stay excluded from the five years; where it lapses, the old proceeding dies, the land is the owner’s again, and if the government still wants it, it must begin afresh under the Act of 2013 and pay the new Act’s price. Where possession was taken or the money tendered, there is no lapse however old the award, and the family’s remaining route is the proviso: if the compensation for the majority of holdings in the notification was never deposited in the beneficiaries’ accounts, every beneficiary is entitled to be repriced under the new Act without the proceeding lapsing. The third file therefore teaches the transition’s central forensic lesson, which is that lapse and repricing are different remedies answering different defaults, and a family that pleads the wrong one has spent its limitation on a door that does not open.

The diversion evidence: where acquisition went instead

The comparison so far has been a comparison of texts, and on texts the verdict is not close. This section examines the record of what acquiring bodies did once the generous text existed, because that record is the evidence for the comparison’s central question: whether a stronger statute produced better outcomes, or merely diverted acquisition to the routes the statute did not reach. The field within which the diversion operated is mapped in the field guide to Indian land acquisition law, and the routes themselves are four.

The first route was built into the Act from its first day. Section 105 of the Act of 2013 and its Fourth Schedule placed thirteen central enactments, including the statutes under which land is acquired for national highways and for railways, outside the new Act’s scheme at commencement, subject to a duty on the Central Government under Section 105(3) to extend the new Act’s compensation and rehabilitation provisions to acquisitions under those enactments within one year. The year passed without the extension. What followed is the most instructive sequence in the whole comparison. An ordinance promulgated at the end of December 2014 sought, among wider changes, to make the extension; the ordinance was re-promulgated, its replacement bill passed the Lok Sabha and failed in the Rajya Sabha, and the ordinance was allowed to lapse at the end of August 2015. The extension itself, the one item with cross party support, was then salvaged by executive action: a Removal of Difficulties Order under Section 113, notification S.O. 2368(E) dated 28 August 2015 and effective from 1 September 2015, applied the First Schedule’s compensation provisions and the Second and Third Schedules’ rehabilitation provisions to acquisitions under the thirteen scheduled enactments. What the Order could not extend was the procedural heart of the Act: the Social Impact Assessment and the consent thresholds do not travel with the money schedules. The practical result defines the first route precisely. A family whose land is taken for a national highway after September 2015 is paid at the 2013 Act’s compensation rates and owed its rehabilitation package, but the taking follows the highways statute’s own procedure, with no study of whether the land is the bare minimum and no consent of any proportion of the families. The money half of the reform reached the exempted statutes; the voice half did not, and acquisition under those statutes, which carry the largest infrastructure programmes in the country, proceeded at scale on exactly those terms.

The second route is the market. Section 46 of the Act of 2013 itself contemplates it: where a private company purchases land through private negotiation at or above limits the appropriate government prescribes, the rehabilitation provisions apply to the purchase, the Centre having notified limits of twenty hectares in urban areas and forty hectares in rural areas for its own purposes. Below the threshold, a negotiated purchase stands entirely outside the Act: no study, no consent percentage, no Authority, and no rehabilitation beyond what the price negotiation extracts. The route is not an abuse; it is the ordinary law of sale, and its growth after 2013 is the predictable response of buyers to a statute whose disciplines attach to acquisition and not to purchase. For the seller the route is genuinely double edged, and the comparison should hold both edges. A negotiated sale can beat the statutory figure, because the buyer who needs the parcel must persuade rather than compel, and the seller who refuses keeps the land, a power no acquisition regime gives. But the protections of the Act are collective as well as individual: the consent threshold counts families, the study examines the project, and the rehabilitation package reaches the tenants and labourers whom a purchase from the title holder leaves with nothing and no one to claim from. Diversion through purchase therefore improves the position of the owner who can bargain and abandons the position of the loser who cannot, which is the Act’s most protected class.

The third route is land pooling, the route that avoids acquisition entirely by redesigning the transaction. Under a pooling scheme, landowners contribute their parcels voluntarily to a development authority, which assembles and services the whole area with roads and infrastructure, and returns to each owner a smaller developed plot within the planned layout, together in the leading schemes with annuity payments for a term of years. The largest Indian example is the Amaravati capital city scheme in Andhra Pradesh, conducted under the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority Act 2014, under which about thirty three thousand acres were pooled in the first phase: owners received developed residential and commercial plots in the new capital in return for their agricultural land, with annuity payments for ten years, and an owner who declined to pool could fall back on acquisition under the Act of 2013. Pooling answers the deepest objection to the old law, that the owner watched the appreciation of his own land from outside the fence, by making the owner a participant in the appreciation: a small plot in a serviced capital city may be worth more than the field it replaces. Its limits are equally structural. Pooling works where a single authority is building a city on assembled agricultural land and can credibly promise serviced plots; it does not assemble a highway corridor, a railway, or a mine. It is voluntary in form, which distinguishes it from acquisition, although the voluntariness of a scheme in which the surrounding land is all committed deserves the same scrutiny as any consent. And it sits outside both Acts compared here, owing its terms to its own statute and its own politics, so its spread is further evidence for the diversion thesis in its general form: the energy that the 2013 Act made expensive inside acquisition flowed to wherever land could be assembled without it.

The fourth route is federal. When the central amendment attempt failed in 2015, the exemptions it proposed travelled to the States, and were enacted there through the assent route the Constitution provides for State legislation on a concurrent subject that conflicts with a central law, the proviso to Article 254(2). The episode, including the ordinance that preceded it and the programme the States copied, is treated in full in the account of the land acquisition ordinance battle, and only its comparative significance belongs here. Tamil Nadu acted first and by the broadest technique, its amendment of 2015 placing three Tamil Nadu acquisition statutes in the Fourth Schedule of the central Act with retrospective effect, so that acquisitions under those State statutes stood outside the central scheme altogether, compensation code included. Gujarat followed in 2016 with the most complete adoption of the failed central programme, exempting projects for national security and defence, rural infrastructure, affordable housing, industrial corridors and infrastructure including partnership projects from the assessment and consent provisions within the State. Telangana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Jharkhand also enacted amendments through the same route, Maharashtra exempting partnership projects from the assessment and consent clauses among them. The Centre for Policy Research’s mapping of the State response counts at least six State governments legislating in this direction, most governed by the ruling party at the Centre or its allies and Telangana not, which indicates an administrative appetite for easier acquisition that ran wider than one party’s programme. The amendments were challenged in the Supreme Court in proceedings brought by Medha Patkar against five States, on the ground that removing consent, assessment and public participation destroyed the essence of the Act of 2013; the Court issued notices, and the competence of State legislatures to amend through the assent route was not in serious doubt. The comparative point is exact: in the States that amended, the comparison between the two Acts must be run on the amended text, and for the exempted categories the 2013 column of the table above collapses back toward the 1894 column on precisely the dimensions, study and consent, that the reform was proudest of.

What is diversion, and why does it decide this comparison?

Diversion is the movement of a regulated activity to the routes the regulation does not reach, in response to the regulation’s own costs, and it decides this comparison because it converts the question from which statute is better into the question of which statute a given acquisition actually used.

A landowner whose field is taken under the general Act receives the 2013 settlement in full. A landowner whose field is taken under a scheduled statute receives its money without its voice. A landowner whose field is bought receives a bargain instead of a settlement, and the labourer on that field receives nothing from either. A landowner in an amending State receives the settlement with its front end removed. The statutes did not change; the route did, and the route is chosen by the acquirer, which is why the deciding factor in this comparison is not generosity but reach.

Weighed as evidence, the diversion record supports a conclusion narrower and stronger than either slogan. It does not support the claim that the Act of 2013 stalled development, because acquisition continued at scale throughout the period, through the scheduled statutes, through purchase, through pooling and through the State amended general Act; a stalled system does not move that much land. It supports, instead, the claim that the Act repriced the routes: acquisition under the general Act became the most expensive and slowest way to assemble land, and rational acquirers, public as much as private, chose cheaper routes where the law offered them. That is what a protective statute in a federal system with exempted siblings should be expected to do, and the expectation was available in advance, because the exemptions were in the enacted text, the purchase route was contemplated by the text, and the assent route was in the Constitution. The reform’s authors legislated a floor for one route among several and left the other routes standing, and the traffic behaved as traffic does.

The honest costs: what the stronger statute genuinely charges

A comparison that prices only the loser’s side of the ledger is advocacy, and the costs of the 2013 settlement are real, assignable and owed a statement at full strength. The first cost is money, and it is borne, in the end, by the public. Higher compensation is a transfer rather than a destruction of value: the money that leaves a project’s accounts enters the accounts of the families whose land the project occupies, and an economy does not become poorer because the price of an input is paid to its owners instead of being extracted from them below value. But the transfer is financed from project budgets and public funds, which means it is financed by the users of the road, the passengers on the railway, the consumers of the power, and the taxpayers behind all three, and there is a level at which the compensation bill for a project exceeds what the project’s users can be asked to carry. The industry case made this argument at passage in its crude form, the three to three and a half times warning, and its developed form deserves the respect of an answer rather than a dismissal: the answer is the worked parcel above, which shows the multiple to be a function of a notified factor and a contestable base, and which shows the old Act’s own figure to have been one and sixty four hundredths times market value rather than the bare value the crude comparison assumes. Between an undercompensating old law and an overcompensating reading of the new one, the arithmetic supports a large increase and not an unlimited one, and the factor band is precisely the instrument by which a State that judges its projects overburdened can lawfully moderate the increase, at the price of moderating what its own displaced families receive.

The second cost is time, and unlike money it is destroyed rather than transferred. The study, the hearing, the appraisal, the consent process, the scheme and the award discipline consume months and years during which capital waits, prices move, and a project’s sanctioned cost and its completion cost drift apart. This is the strongest form of the industry case, stronger than the compensation argument it is usually confused with, and the conduct of the Act’s opponents confirms its strength: the amendment attempt of 2014 and 2015, mounted by a government that described the Act as unworkable, was directed overwhelmingly at the time consuming chapters, the assessment and consent provisions, and largely left the compensation formula standing. The formula, it turned out, was the part of the settlement even its organised critics were prepared to pay; the calendar was the part they were not. The honest answer on the landowner’s side is not that the time is free, but that the old Act’s speed was itself purchased with the loser’s protections: a process that can dispense with the only hearing, value on a frozen date and take possession before the award is quick in the way that a process is quick when one side’s steps have been deleted from it. Some of the new Act’s time is the price of asking questions the old Act never asked, and a comparison that counts the delay without counting the questions will always find the old law efficient.

The third cost is the one the reform’s own supporters press hardest, and it belongs in this section because it is a cost of the new Act’s design rather than of its enemies. The Act’s most valuable innovation, rehabilitation for persons without title, is also its hardest to enforce, because it depends on identifying people whom no record names. The census of affected families is the gateway to the Second Schedule, and a tenant whose tenancy was oral, a sharecropper whose arrangement the record attributes to the owner, or a labourer whose three years of work in the affected area left no paper, must be found and counted by the same administration whose project their counting makes more expensive. Where the census fails, the Act’s signature promise fails with it, silently, for the class least able to litigate the omission. The Schedule’s fixed rupee figures compound the problem in a quieter way: the five lakh payment, the three thousand rupees a month of subsistence, the fifty thousand rupee grants are stated in the enacted text and erode with inflation from the day of enactment, only the annuity carrying indexation, so the package owed to a family displaced in the Act’s later years is worth materially less in real terms than the package owed at its commencement, and restoring the figures requires Parliament to amend a schedule, an act of housekeeping no government has treated as urgent. A verdict for the new Act that omits these two defects, the census problem and the erosion problem, has not understood the Act it is praising: the reform is strongest exactly where its machinery is automatic, the compensation formula, and weakest exactly where its machinery depends on the diligence of the administration it distrusts.

Against these costs stands the counter argument about the old Act’s cheapness, and it should be stated as the landowners’ side states it, because it is the necessary completion of the ledger. The old Act’s compensation was systematically below replacement value, not occasionally but by construction: it valued land at the date of notification in a rising market, proved the value from a deed record that understated real prices as a matter of custom, added a solatium of thirty per cent for the compulsion, and left the displaced to rebuild with a sum that everyone in the transaction understood would not buy the equivalent land in the equivalent place. The saving the old system delivered to project budgets was therefore not an efficiency. It was a levy, collected from the class of citizens least able to bear it and least represented in the forums that set it, and applied to subsidise infrastructure whose benefits were distributed across the whole public. That the levy was lawful, and that it was collected for a century under a statute every government found convenient, does not change what it was. The 2013 settlement is, in this light, less a new generosity than the ending of an old subsidy, and its costs are the subsidy’s costs becoming visible at last in the accounts where they always belonged.

The verdict, by reader type

For the landowner and the adviser, the verdict is practical and it is conditional on the route. Where an acquisition proceeds under the Act of 2013 in a State that has not amended it, the loser is better off than under the Act of 1894 on every dimension this article has compared: a purpose that must be found in a list, a study that must be survived, consent on the routes where a private beneficiary waits, a base value built from the higher half of the deed record, a multiplier, a doubled solatium, a rehabilitation package owed even to the family without title, a specialist forum on a strict timetable, and clocks that run against the state. The practical work follows from the comparison rather than from the verdict. Establish first which statute and which route govern the file, because that classification decides which column of the table the family lives in; obtain the award and audit it against the parameters, the factor notification, the deed set and the census; and treat the timetables, six weeks for the Section 64 reference among them, as the unforgiving things they are. The general position described in this article is information about two statutes, not advice on an individual matter, and a family facing a live acquisition needs advice on its own file, because in this field the boundary provisions and the deadlines are worth as much money as the principles. Readers assembling that file, the notifications, the study, the consent record, the award and the factor notification, will find that keeping the documents together and readable matters more than any single argument, and an award or a notification received as a spreadsheet or a document file can be opened and checked through the ReportMedic office file viewer for documents and spreadsheets before it is taken to an adviser.

For the legislator and the staffer, the verdict is the diversion lesson, and it is the most transferable finding in this comparison. A protective statute legislates for the routes it reaches, and its real incidence is set by the routes it leaves standing. Parliament in 2013 wrote the strongest acquisition code in the country’s history and simultaneously scheduled thirteen enactments outside it, contemplated the purchase route within it, set a compensation factor as a State notification inside it, and legislated on a concurrent subject under a Constitution that lets States amend it away with assent. Every one of those openings was used. The lesson is not that protection is futile, because the families who did receive the settlement received something the old law never gave anyone, and the money half of the settlement was eventually carried even into the scheduled statutes by executive order. The lesson is that the drafting of a protective statute in a federal system is the drafting of its exemptions, its thresholds and its defaults, and that the debate a legislature spends on the headline formula is usually spent on the part of the statute that matters least to its eventual incidence.

For the aspirant, the verdict is a structure rather than a slogan. The comparison that examiners reward is the one this article has built: twelve dimensions, one identical parcel priced by both codes, a deciding factor named, and the counter readings answered rather than omitted. The candidate who writes that the Act of 2013 pays four times the market value has repeated the ceiling of one component as if it were the whole; the candidate who writes that it stalled development has mistaken diversion for paralysis; and the candidate who writes that it is unambiguously better for landowners has forgotten the highways acquisition, the purchase below the threshold, the pooling scheme and the Gujarat amendment, in each of which a landowner meets something materially closer to the old world than to the new. The accurate sentence is longer than the slogan, and it is the sentence this article’s verdict supplies.

The cases where the general verdict does not hold should be collected in one place, because a verdict without its exceptions is a slogan that has changed sides. The verdict does not hold for the family taken under a scheduled statute before the 2015 Order, which received neither the money nor the voice of the new settlement. It holds only in its money half for the family taken under a scheduled statute after the Order, which is paid at the new rates inside the old procedure. It does not hold for the family whose land the government takes for its own use on the consent dimension, because no consent is required on that route under either the letter of the new Act or the practice of the old. It does not hold, on the dimensions of study and consent, in the States that amended those chapters away for their exempted categories. It does not hold for the title less family omitted from the census, for whom the new Act’s signature promise was never activated. And it does not hold in reverse for the project that genuinely could not bear the new calendar: there are acquisitions, linear, urgent in substance rather than in formula, and thinly benefited, for which the old Act’s speed was a real public good, and the new Act’s confinement of its urgency power means those projects wait in the ordinary queue like everything else. A defended verdict is not weakened by its exception list. It is distinguished from a slogan by having one.

The comparison at ground level: one State and one sector

Abstract comparisons become testable when they are run inside a single jurisdiction and a single industry, and two runs show the whole argument in miniature. Take Gujarat first. A family in Gujarat whose land is acquired for a government irrigation project meets the Act of 2013 substantially as Parliament wrote it: the study, the scheme, the formula, the Authority. A family in the same State whose identical land is acquired for an industrial corridor project inside the categories the Gujarat amendment of 2016 exempted meets a different statute wearing the same name: no Social Impact Assessment, no consent chapter, and a process whose front end has been legislatively removed, while the compensation formula, which the amendment left standing, still multiplies and doubles. The two families hold the same central Act, live in the same State, and lose similar land in the same decade, and the comparison between the Act of 1894 and the Act of 2013 gives a different answer for each of them, full for the first and partial for the second, on exactly the dimensions the State chose to disapply. Nothing in that outcome is an administrative failure; it is the assent route working as the Constitution designed it to work, which is why this article treats the State amendments as part of the comparison rather than as footnotes to it.

Take highways second. A family whose land is taken for a national highway meets the National Highways Act’s own procedure, as it did under the old dispensation, because that statute stood in the Fourth Schedule from the new Act’s first day. Before the Removal of Difficulties Order of 2015, that family was in the old world entirely, compensated under the highways statute’s incorporation of the older principles while the families on either side of the corridor, taken under the general Act, received the new settlement. After the Order, the highway family is paid by the new Act’s formula and owed its rehabilitation schedules, while the taking itself still proceeds without the study and without consent. The sector therefore exhibits the diversion settlement in its stable form: the money was nationalised, the voice was not. A comparison that asks only whether the Act of 2013 improved the highway family’s position must answer in two parts, yes in the award and no in the process, and the two parts correspond exactly to the two halves of the reform, the half that could be extended by an executive order under a removal of difficulties power and the half that could not.

The two runs teach the same lesson from opposite ends. In Gujarat, the variation is territorial and legislative: the settlement’s content changes at a State border because a State legislature changed it. In highways, the variation is sectoral and structural: the settlement’s content changes at the boundary of a schedule because Parliament itself placed the sector outside. In both, the landowner’s decisive question is anterior to every argument about generosity, and it is the question with which this article opened: which statute, in which version, governs this field. The comparison between the two Acts is the map; the route is the territory, and the family that reads only the map will misjudge the ground it is standing on.

Closing verdict

Better law, diverted acquisition: that is the comparison in four words, and the four words can be cashed out in full. On the texts, the Act of 2013 is better for the person losing land on every dimension that can be compared, better in the definition of the power, better in the procedure before the taking, better in the arithmetic of the price, and better beyond comparison in the recognition of losses the old Act could not see at all. On the record, the improvement was real and partial in a specific, describable way: the settlement governed a shrinking share of the country’s land assembly, because acquisition moved, rationally and lawfully, to the routes the settlement did not reach, and the families on those routes received the old world’s terms or something negotiated in its shadow. Whether the reform counts as a success therefore depends on which effect dominates in a given State and a given sector, and any answer that does not specify the State, the statute and the route is answering an easier question than the one the record asks. What can be said without qualification is narrower and, for that reason, worth more. The Act of 1894 asked the loser to trust the taker, and priced that trust at thirty per cent of a frozen value. The Act of 2013 declined to ask for trust at all, and built a machine of lists, studies, consents, formulas and clocks in its place. The machine is expensive, incomplete and unevenly applied. It is also the first acquisition law in the country’s history that treats the person losing land as a party to be answered rather than an obstacle to be compensated, and the diversion its costs provoked is the measure, not the refutation, of how much it changed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the main difference between the 1894 Act and LARR 2013?

The main difference is what each Act thinks the transaction is. The Land Acquisition Act 1894 is a procedure for taking: the government decides the land is needed, hears an objection, values the land at the date the process began, pays, and takes possession, with the owner’s only substantial remedy a court reference on price. The Act of 2013 is a settlement of what the taking owes: a defined public purpose, a Social Impact Assessment before the taking, consent of eighty or seventy per cent of affected families where the government acquires for a private company or a partnership project, compensation computed by a prescribed method with a multiplier and a solatium of one hundred per cent, and a rehabilitation package owed to affected families including those without title.

Q: Is compensation actually higher under LARR?

Yes, on any identical set of facts, although by how much depends on figures the acquiring State controls. On this article’s worked parcel, one acre with a market value of ten lakh rupees and assets of one lakh, the Act of 1894 produces an award of sixteen lakh forty thousand rupees: the value, the assets, an additional amount of twelve per cent per annum for two years, and solatium at thirty per cent. The Act of 2013, at the maximum rural factor of two, produces forty four lakh forty thousand rupees, about two and seven tenths times the old figure, before the rehabilitation package that comes on top. At the minimum notified factor of one, the same parcel produces twenty four lakh forty thousand, just under one and a half times the old figure.

Q: Did LARR make land acquisition slower?

For acquisition conducted under the Act itself, yes, deliberately. The Act of 1894 could move from notification to possession in a short sequence, and under its urgency clause could take possession fifteen days after notice with the objection hearing dispensed with. The Act of 2013 front loads a Social Impact Assessment with a public hearing and independent appraisal, a consent process on two of its three routes, the preparation of a rehabilitation scheme, and an award that must be made within twelve months of the declaration on pain of lapse. The qualification the record requires is that acquisition as a whole did not slow to a stop: a large share of it moved to the special statutes, to negotiated purchase and to pooling, where the calendar is shorter, so the system became slower inside the Act and diverted around it.

Q: Which safeguards did LARR add that the 1894 Act lacked?

The principal additions are a defined and enumerated public purpose in place of an undefined one whose declaration was conclusive; a Social Impact Assessment with independent appraisal before acquisition; consent of affected families for acquisition for private companies and partnership projects, and Gram Sabha consent in the Scheduled Areas; a rehabilitation and resettlement package owed to every affected family, including families without title; a food security safeguard for irrigated multi-cropped land; a dedicated Authority for disputes in place of the ordinary civil court; the return of land left unutilised for five years; and a forty per cent share of the appreciated value for original owners where acquired land is transferred without development within five years. The Act of 1894 contained none of these in any form.

Q: Do old acquisition cases follow the 1894 Act or LARR?

It depends on where the old proceeding had reached when the Act of 2013 commenced on 1 January 2014, and the dividing rule is Section 24. If no award under Section 11 of the Act of 1894 had been made by commencement, the proceeding continues but compensation is determined under the new Act. If an award had been made, the proceeding continues under the Act of 1894 as if it had not been repealed. Where the award was five years old or more and the state had neither taken physical possession nor paid the compensation, the proceedings are deemed to have lapsed under Section 24(2) as construed by the Constitution Bench in 2020, subject also to a proviso that reprices compensation under the new Act where the majority of holdings were never paid.

Q: Has LARR reduced land acquisition disputes?

It changed their subject more than their volume, and an honest answer separates the two. The disputes the old Act generated in bulk, over whether a frozen notification date value bore any relation to the land’s real price, were reduced in kind because the new computation builds the base from the higher half of recent sale deeds and then multiplies it, leaving less room between the award and any plausible value. Against that, the Act created new fields of dispute the old law never contained: the construction of Section 24 filled the courts for six years until the Constitution Bench settled it in 2020, and disputes over the notified factor, the census of affected families and the classification of the acquisition route are the working litigation of the new regime. Disputes moved from the price of land to the architecture of the settlement.

Q: Which land acquisition law is better for a landowner?

On the statutory terms, the Act of 2013, on every dimension that can be compared: consent on two routes, a study the taking must survive, a higher and better built compensation base, a doubled solatium after multiplication, rehabilitation owed even without title, a specialist forum, and clocks that run against the state. The qualification is reach. A landowner whose land is taken under one of the scheduled special statutes receives the new Act’s money without its procedure; a landowner whose land is bought by negotiation receives a bargain rather than the settlement; a landowner in a State that amended the assessment and consent chapters away meets a version of the Act much closer to the old one. The better law governs only the acquisitions that actually proceed under it, which is the central finding of this comparison.

Q: Did LARR change who can acquire land?

It changed the classification rather than the identity of the acquirer. Under both Acts the acquiring authority is the appropriate government; land is not acquired by companies directly. What the Act of 2013 changed is the set of purposes and beneficiaries for which the government may deploy its power, and the conditions attaching to each. It defined public purpose by enumeration, brought acquisition for public private partnership projects and for private companies for a public purpose expressly within the scheme, and attached the consent thresholds to those two routes while leaving acquisition for the government’s own use free of any consent requirement. It also, by Section 46, drew large negotiated purchases by private companies partway into its rehabilitation code, a reach the Act of 1894 never attempted over a private sale.

Q: How is the same plot of land valued differently under the two Acts?

The two Acts distrust different evidence. The Act of 1894 valued the plot at the date of its Section 4 notification and proved that value, in practice, from registered sale deeds, a record that systematically understated the prices actually paid, and then added thirty per cent solatium and a twelve per cent annual amount. The Act of 2013 fixes the value by comparison: the Collector must take the highest of the stamp value for the area, the average of the higher half of comparable sale deeds of the preceding three years, and any amount agreed in a consent process, under Section 26. That market value is then multiplied by the First Schedule factor, the value of assets is added, and a solatium of one hundred per cent is imposed on the assembled figure. The same plot therefore enters the old computation as a frozen figure to be consoled, and the new computation as a floor to be multiplied and doubled.

Q: Does the 1894 Act or LARR give the landowner more time before possession is taken?

The Act of 2013, at every stage. Under the Act of 1894, the ordinary sequence allowed possession once the award was made, and the urgency clause allowed possession fifteen days after the Section 9 notice, before any award existed, with the objection hearing dispensed with. Under the Act of 2013, possession ordinarily follows a process containing a study, a hearing, a rehabilitation scheme and an award, and even its urgency power allows possession only thirty days after the Section 21 notice, only for defence, national security or calamity, and only after eighty per cent of the estimated compensation has been tendered. The old Act’s fastest mode was available for any project the government called urgent; the new Act’s fastest mode is confined to named emergencies and priced with a seventy five per cent addition to compensation.

Q: Can a landowner stop an acquisition under either Act, or only argue about the price?

Under the Act of 1894, in substance, only argue about the price. The Section 5A objection allowed the owner to be heard against the taking itself, but the acquiring government decided, its declaration of public purpose was conclusive, and courts almost never stopped an acquisition on the ground that the purpose was not public; the litigation the Act contemplated was the Section 18 reference on amount. Under the Act of 2013 the owner still holds no individual veto, and a government acquiring for its own use needs nobody’s consent. What the owner holds instead are collective and procedural levers with real stopping power: the consent thresholds on the private and partnership routes, the Gram Sabha consent in the Scheduled Areas, and a study whose appraisal can recommend abandonment. The change is from a hearing that could not stop anything to conditions whose non fulfilment can.

Q: Why did acquisition shift toward the highways and railways statutes after 2013?

Because those statutes stood outside the new settlement and were cheaper to use. Section 105 and the Fourth Schedule of the Act of 2013 placed thirteen central enactments, including the national highways and railways statutes, outside its scheme at commencement. The duty to extend the new Act’s compensation and rehabilitation provisions to them within a year was not performed in time, and when the extension came, through the Removal of Difficulties Order of 2015, it carried the money schedules and not the assessment or the consent chapters. An acquiring body routing a project through a scheduled statute therefore paid the new compensation rates, after 2015, while keeping the older and faster procedure, with no study and no consent. Rational acquirers chose the route that cost less time, and the largest infrastructure programmes in the country ran on it.

Q: What is land pooling, and how does it sit outside both acquisition Acts?

Land pooling is a method of assembling land without acquiring it. Owners contribute their parcels voluntarily to a development authority, which lays out the whole area with roads and services and returns to each owner a smaller developed plot inside the plan, commonly with annuity payments for a term of years. The Amaravati capital city scheme in Andhra Pradesh, under the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority Act 2014, pooled about thirty three thousand acres on this model, with owners receiving developed plots and annuities and those who declined left to the acquisition route. Pooling sits outside both Acts because nobody’s land is compulsorily taken: the transaction is governed by the pooling statute and the scheme’s own terms, so neither the Act of 1894 nor the Act of 2013, with its study, consent and rehabilitation machinery, applies to it at all.

Q: If a State has amended the LARR Act, which version of the comparison applies there?

The amended version, within that State. Land acquisition is a concurrent subject, and under the proviso to Article 254(2) of the Constitution a State law that conflicts with the central Act prevails within the State if the bill was reserved for the President and received assent. Gujarat’s amendment of 2016 exempted specified categories of projects, including defence, rural infrastructure, affordable housing and industrial corridors, from the assessment and consent provisions; Tamil Nadu’s amendment of 2015 placed three State acquisition statutes in the Fourth Schedule altogether; Telangana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Jharkhand amended in the same direction. For an acquisition in one of those States in an exempted category, the 2013 column of the comparison loses its study and consent rows, and the family’s position is materially closer to the old Act than the central text suggests. The first question in any real matter is therefore the State’s text, not the Centre’s.

Q: How does each Act treat a tenant or labourer who owns no land?

The Act of 1894 does not treat them at all. Its compensation runs to persons interested, a class anchored in legal interests in the land, so the tenant, sharecropper or labourer whose livelihood the acquisition destroys receives no compensation and no rehabilitation, because the Act sees the asset and not the life built on it. The Act of 2013 defines affected family in Section 3(c) to include landless agricultural labourers, tenants and sharecroppers who worked in the affected area for three years before the acquisition and whose primary livelihood is affected, and owes that family the Second Schedule package: housing where displaced, and the choice between employment, a one time payment of five lakh rupees or an indexed annuity, with subsistence and other grants. The one limitation to record is that such families are owed entitlements but their agreement is not counted toward the consent percentages, which are counted on the proprietary families.

Q: How does the urgency power under LARR differ from Section 17 of the 1894 Act?

Section 17 of the Act of 1894 allowed the government, in any case it characterised as urgent, to dispense with the objection hearing and take possession fifteen days after notice, before any award; over the decades it became a routine fast track for ordinary projects, because invoking it cost the acquiring body nothing. Section 40 of the Act of 2013 confines urgency to the minimum area required for the defence of India or national security, or for emergencies arising out of natural calamities, or another emergency approved by Parliament. Possession may be taken thirty days after the notice under Section 21, eighty per cent of the estimated compensation must first be tendered, and additional compensation of seventy five per cent is payable except in the sovereignty and security class. The power survives, caged by purpose, by proportion and by price.

Q: Which Act protects irrigated multi-cropped farmland, and how?

Only the Act of 2013; the Act of 1894 protected no class of land from acquisition on any ground connected with its use. Section 10 of the Act of 2013 provides that no irrigated multi-cropped land shall be acquired except in exceptional circumstances as a demonstrable last resort, that the aggregate of such acquisition must stay within limits the appropriate government notifies, the Centre having notified one per cent of a district’s irrigated multi-cropped land over a five year block for its own projects, and that an equivalent area of culturable wasteland must be developed for agriculture or its value deposited for investment in food security. Two limits qualify the protection: the caps depend on governments notifying them, and linear projects such as railways, highways, canals and power lines stand outside the section altogether.

Q: Where does a compensation dispute go under the 1894 Act and under LARR?

Under the Act of 1894 the dissatisfied person applied, under Section 18, for a reference to the ordinary civil court, which reheard the valuation question as a civil proceeding, with an appeal lying to the High Court under Section 54. Under the Act of 2013 the objection travels by a Section 64 reference to the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Authority, the dedicated tribunal established under Section 51, which under Section 69 must examine whether the Collector followed the parameters of Sections 26 to 30, so the inquiry is an audit of the computation against the statute as well as a valuation. The reference is on a strict timetable, six weeks in the ordinary case, and an appeal lies to the High Court under Section 74. The forum change is part of the settlement: a specialist body, working to a checklist, in place of a general court working through a general list.

Q: Should the 1894 Act have been amended instead of repealed and replaced?

The amendment route was tried, and its limits are a matter of record. The amendment of 1984 repriced the old Act successfully, raising the solatium, adding the twelve per cent amount and imposing an award deadline, but it left the design untouched because amendment works on the text it finds. The attempt of 2007 proceeded by amendment plus a separate rehabilitation bill, passed the Lok Sabha in 2009 and lapsed, and its rehabilitation half attached benefits only above a threshold of displaced families. The features the Act of 2013 is valued for, consent, rehabilitation for the title less, the affected family definition, could not be reached by amending a statute whose organising idea was that the state’s obligation ends at payment to the person interested. Replacement cost a decade of transition litigation, much of it over Section 24; amendment would have cost less confusion and delivered a different, smaller reform. The choice was between those two, and Parliament chose the larger one knowingly.

Q: What does LARR’s higher compensation mean for the cost of public projects?

It raises the land component of project cost substantially, and the honest accounting separates the transfer from the burden. Most of the increase is a transfer: money that under the old Act stayed in project budgets because land was taken below replacement value moves to the families whose land the project occupies, and the public that uses the project pays the real price of its land instead of the price being collected silently from the displaced. The genuine burden on projects is concentrated elsewhere: in the time the study, consent and award stages consume, during which capital waits and costs drift, and in the extreme cases at the maximum notified factor where, as this article’s worked parcel shows, the land bill approaches two and seven tenths times what the old Act would have paid. A State that judges the burden excessive has a lawful instrument in the factor band itself, and moderating the factor moderates its own families’ compensation by the same stroke.