The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013
| Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 | |
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| An Act to ensure, in consultation with institutions of local self-government and Gram Sabhas established under the Constitution, a humane, participative, informed and transparent process for land acquisition for industrialisation, development of essential infrastructural facilities and urbanisation with the least disturbance to the owners of the land and other affected families and provide just and fair compensation to the affected families whose land has been acquired or proposed to be acquired or are affected by such acquisition and make adequate provisions for such affected persons for their rehabilitation and resettlement and for ensuring that the cumulative outcome of compulsory acquisition should be that affected persons become partners in development leading to an improvement in their post–acquisition social and economic status and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto. | |
| Citation | No. 30 of 2013 |
| Territorial extent | India (except state of Jammu & Kashmir) |
| Enacted by | Parliament of India |
| Date enacted |
29 August 2013 and 5 September 2013(Lok Sabha) |
| Date assented to | 27 September 2013 |
| Date signed | 27 September 2013 |
| Date commenced | 1 January 2014 |
| Bill citation | No. 77-C of 2011 |
| Committee report | 17 May 2012 |
| Repealing legislation | |
| Land Acquisition Act, 1894 | |
| Status: In force | |
29 August 2013 and 5 September 2013(Lok Sabha)
The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (also Land Acquisition Act, 2013) is an Act of Indian Parliament that regulates land acquisition and lays down the procedure and rules for granting compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement to the affected persons in India. The Act has provisions to provide fair compensation to those whose land is taken away, brings transparency to the process of acquisition of land to set up factories or buildings, infrastructural projects and assures rehabilitation of those affected. The Act establishes regulations for land acquisition as a part of India's massive industrialisation drive driven by public-private partnership. The Act replaced the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, a nearly 120-year-old law enacted during British rule.
The Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011 was introduced in Lok Sabha on 7 September 2011. The bill was then passed by it on 29 August 2013 and by Rajya Sabha on 4 September 2013. The bill then received the assent of the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee on 27 September 2013. The Act came into force from 1 January 2014.
An amendment bill was then introduced in Parliament to endorse the Ordinance. Lok Sabha passed the bill but the same is still lying for passage by the Rajya Sabha. On 30 May 2015, President of India promulgated the amendment ordinance for third time.
The Government of India believed there was a heightened public concern on land acquisition issues in India. Of particular concern was that despite many amendments, over the years, to India's Land Acquisition Act of 1894, there was an absence of a cohesive national law that addressed fair compensation when private land is acquired for public use, and fair rehabilitation of land owners and those directly affected from loss of livelihoods. The Government of India believed that a combined law was necessary, one that legally requires rehabilitation and resettlement necessarily and simultaneously follow government acquisition of land for public purposes.
Forty-Fourth Amendment Act of 1978 omitted Art 19(1) (f) with the net result being:-
State must pay compensation at the market value for such land, building or structure acquired (Inserted by Constitution, Seventeenth Amendment Act, 1964), the same can be found in the earlier rulings when property right was a fundamental right (such as 1954 AIR 170, 1954 SCR 558, which propounded that the word “Compensation” deployed in Article 31(2) implied full compensation, that is the market value of the property at the time of the acquisition. The Legislature must “ensure that what is determined as payable must be compensation, that is, a just equivalent of what the owner has been deprived of”). Elsewhere, Justice, Reddy, O Chinnappa ruled (State Of Maharashtra v. Chandrabhan Tale on 7 July 1983) that the fundamental right to property has been abolished because of its incompatibility with the goals of “justice” social, economic and political and “equality of status and of opportunity” and with the establishment of “a socialist democratic republic, as contemplated by the Constitution. There is no reason why a new concept of property should be introduced in the place of the old so as to bring in its wake the vestiges of the doctrine of Laissez Faire and create, in the name of efficiency, a new oligarchy. Efficiency has many facets and one is yet to discover an infallible test of efficiency to suit the widely differing needs of a developing society such as ours” (1983 AIR 803, 1983 SCR (3) 327) (Dey Biswas 2014, 14-15 footnote).
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