Amendments, State Models and the Alternatives to Acquisition: Complete Notes (Part J)

Part J is the Act's political afterlife: the ordinance that tried to suspend its heart, the Bill that could not pass, the State amendments that enacted the dilution locally, Tamil Nadu's exemption-and-validation saga, and the voluntary instruments, pooling and purchase, that now assemble more land than compulsion does. This consolidated note covers Topics 94 to 99 of this series.

1. The Central Assault: Ordinance and Bill

The RFCTLARR (Amendment) Ordinance of 31 December 2014 inserted a Section 10A letting the appropriate Government exempt five categories, defence, rural infrastructure, affordable housing, industrial corridors, and infrastructure-PPP projects on government land, from the SIA, the food-security bar and the consent requirement, while widening private company to private entity, excluding stay periods from Section 24(2), routing Section 87 prosecutions through Section 197 CrPC, stretching Section 101 to the project's own timeline, and, the one consensual piece, aligning the Fourth Schedule on the Act's compensation and R&R from 1 January 2015. The replacement 2015 Amendment Bill passed the Lok Sabha on 10 March 2015 with nine softenings (social infrastructure deleted from the exemptions, industrial corridors confined to one kilometre either side and government-established, wasteland surveyed before agricultural land, employment mandatory for farm-labour families), stalled in the Rajya Sabha, went to a Joint Parliamentary Committee on 12 May 2015 that never reported consensus, and lapsed with the sixteenth Lok Sabha. The Ordinance, repromulgated on 3 April and 30 May 2015, was allowed to lapse on 31 August 2015, with the Removal of Difficulties Order of 28 August 2015 rescuing the Fourth Schedule alignment. The episode fixed the subject's politics: compensation is consensus, process is contest, and repromulgation's constitutional shadow (Krishna Kumar Singh, 2017) hangs over the method.

2. The Federal Relocation: The State Amendments

• The wave: Gujarat (2016), Telangana (2017, adding a Section 31A lump-sum R&R option), Haryana (2017, with the Section 87A sanction gate), Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Maharashtra (2018), Karnataka (2019), each reserved for and receiving Presidential assent under Article 254(2), prevailing in-State over the 2013 text.
• The template: the lapsed Bill relocated: 10A-style exemption of favoured categories from SIA, food security and consent, with Sections 87, 101 and 24 adjusted in several States, and compensation and R&R left untouched everywhere.
• The open question: challenges to the amendments' validity, can Article 254(2) carry variation that guts a beneficial central scheme, remain substantially undecided; the amendments operate meanwhile, so the State's amended text is always the first document.
• Tamil Nadu's different road: the 2014 amendment (assent 1 January 2015) inserted Section 105A exempting the State's three acquisition Acts (the Harijan Welfare Schemes Act 1978, Industrial Purposes Act 1997, Highways Act 2001); the Madras High Court (2019) held the three Acts had already died of Article 254(1) repugnancy on 1 January 2014 and exemption could not revive the dead; the Revival and Validation Act, 2019 re-enacted them retrospectively from 26 September 2013 with fresh Presidential assent, and G. Mohan Rao (2021) upheld it as legitimate validation, curing the defect, not overruling the court. Tamil Nadu acquires under its own statutes at 2013-standard compensation.

3. The Voluntary Instruments

• Land pooling: owners contribute land and receive smaller, developed, more valuable plots (with annuities in schemes like Amaravati's), the authority financing infrastructure from the retained share, under State town-planning law: Gujarat's town planning schemes the century-old ancestor, Amaravati the scale experiment and the risk lesson, Delhi's policy the codified, slow-delivering version. Consent and upside for the owner; project risk, thinner protection for the landless, and no SIA or R&R of force as the trade.
• Direct purchase: the State buys at policy-fixed premiums benchmarked to the Act's arithmetic, Haryana's e-Bhoomi, Uttar Pradesh's mutual-consent expressway purchases, Telangana's G.O. framework, gaining speed and finality outside the Act because nothing is compelled. The checkpoints: consent must be real rather than acquisition's shadow; the landless are unprotected save by Section 46 and policy generosity; and the 2013 computation operates as the floor every bargain is struck against.
• The present practice: most States now run a procurement menu, negotiate or pool first, acquire the holdouts, so the Act's daily work is as much disciplining the alternatives as running its own machinery.

4. The Part at a Glance

5. The Topics of This Part

• Topic 94: The 2014 Ordinance and its repromulgations
• Topic 95: The 2015 Amendment Bill and Section 10A
• Topic 96: State amendments under Article 254(2)
• Topic 97: Tamil Nadu's Section 105A and the validation saga
• Topic 98: Land pooling models
• Topic 99: Negotiated and direct purchase policies