UPA Act helps owners reclaim land

NEW DELHI: As the NDA government’s land bill remains stuck in a logjam with the opposition stonewalling it in Rajya Sabha, it’s the UPA’s 2013 law that has for now benefitted a section of landowners in Delhi.
In a series of judgments pronounced in recent months (as late as March), the Delhi high court has scrapped acquisition of several acres of land in Delhi by government agencies, some of them dating back to 1986.Delhi Development Authority (DDA) officials told TOI about 150 such judgments have come and the total land that could be released would be at least 100 acres.
“We have challenged the high court orders in about 40 cases in the Supreme Court so far. But there also we lost all of them. It will be a huge loss to the authority as the land likely to be released would cost over Rs 1,000 crore,” a DDA official said.
The land has been returned to owners mainly due to section 24 (2) of “Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013”, which came into force during the UPA regime. The clause says where an award has been made five years or earlier from the date the Act came into force in 2014, the land award can be cancelled if physical possession of the land has not been taken or the compensation has not been paid.
Landowners rushed to court last year, citing the provision to reclaim their land which had not been taken over by the government agencies and the farmers had not taken the compensation. The land differed in size and location ranging from one measuring 18 bighas in Chhatarpur, 30 bighas in Begumpur, 19 bighas in Satbari, 18 bighas in Shayoorpur, 23 bighas in Mahipalpur etc.
Government agencies such as DDA, MCD and L&DO could do little. Though the Narendra Modi government, in its ordinance inserted a rider last year saying that clause 24 won’t come into effect if the delay in physical possession or releasing compensation is owing to stay order by a court or tribunal, HC has refused to buy it. Instead, the court cited judgments delivered in January 2015 by the Supreme Court which held the latest ordinance won’t have a “retrospective but prospective effect”.
The Supreme Court had said this January, “The right conferred to the landholders/owners of the acquired land under section 24(2) of the Act is statutory right and, therefore, cannot be taken away by an ordinance by inserting the provision to the above said sub-section without giving a retrospective effect to the same.”
This means that section 24 continues to apply, being exploited by landowners to reclaim it. For instance in ‘J L Sarna vs UOI’ case on March 10, DDA pleaded helplessness in taking possession poin ting out that there was a court stay. But a bench of Justices B D Ahmed and Sanjiv Sachdeva noted, “These conditions (in section 24[2] of the Act) are unqualified. It does not matter as to what was the reason behind the non-payment of compensation or for not taking possession. If the legislature wanted to qualify the above conditions by excluding the period during which the proceedings of acquisition of land were held up on account of stay or injunction by way of an order of a court, it should have been expressly spelt out.”
The pattern was same in almost every case. Land was acquired but the government agency concerned failed to take physical possession (mostly due to stay orders) or couldn’t ensure compensation to the seller who refused to accept the money. In a few cases, while government agencies claimed they are in physical possession of land, the owners maintained in court that possession is with them. But the court refused to be drawn into the debate since compensation had not been taken by farmer-owner, fulfilling one of the requirements of the clause.
In Surjan Singh vs UOI, DDA argued that compensation payable to landowners was deposited in the treasury. In the process, the land-owning agency maintained that it is shielded from section 24 and protected by another insertion made in the ordinance that if government deposits money in treasury without the seller accepting it later, the acquirement process is valid. Since the ordinance has been held by the SC to apply only prospectively, the HC noted, “In so far as the question of compensation is concerned, this much is clear that compensation has not been paid to the petitioner, but has only been deposited in the treasury, which does not amount to payment of compensation.”
DDA officials said they had taken up the issue of compensation not being released to the farmers by land acquisition collectors. “We had written to the Delhi government to probe whether there is a collusion between farmers and land acquisition collectors. We had also moved the urban development ministry,” said an official.