Acquisition of Part of a House or Building: Section 94

A house half-acquired is usually a house destroyed, and the law has known it since the 1894 Act's Section 49: the State cannot carve a slice out of a dwelling, factory or building against the owner's wish, the owner may insist that the whole be acquired. Section 94 carries the rule forward with its machinery of election, withdrawal and reference. This note covers the owner's option, its mechanics, and the questions the provision decides.

1. The Rule and the Owner's Option

• The bar: the Act's powers are not to be used to acquire a part only of any house, manufactory or other building, if the owner desires that the whole should be acquired, the election belongs to the owner, not to the acquiring authority's budget.
• What travels with the house: the protection covers the building with the land it stands on and what is reasonably appurtenant to its use and enjoyment, the courtyard, the attached garden, the manufactory's yard, so the State cannot take the appurtenance and call the mutilated remainder a whole house.
• The withdrawal valve: the owner who has demanded whole-acquisition may, at any time before the Collector's award, by notice in writing, withdraw or modify the demand, so the election is revisable while the valuation conversation is live, an owner who learns the part's price may prefer to keep the rest after all.
• The deemed limits: the provision protects dwellings and working buildings as functional wholes; it is not a device to force the acquisition of independent, severable structures merely held under one title, and the dispute machinery below polices the difference.

2. The Dispute Machinery

Whether land proposed for acquisition is or is not part of a house, manufactory or building within the section is exactly the kind of mixed question that stalls acquisitions, and the Act sends it to the specialist: the question is referred to the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Authority, and the Collector holds his hand on that land until the Authority's decision, which the section makes operative on the acquisition. The enquiry is functional, not documentary: the tests the old Section 49 case law built, unity of structure, unity of use and enjoyment, whether the part claimed is reasonably required for the convenient enjoyment of the house, carry forward, since the provision's language and purpose are continuous. The burden sits naturally with the owner asserting the unity, proved by use, access, construction and the ordinary life of the property rather than by the sale-deed's schedule.

3. The Provision's Logic and Its Working

• Why whole-acquisition, not damages: severance compensation under Section 28 prices the injury of a divided field; a divided dwelling is not an injury to price but a home ended, and the section prefers honest acquisition of the whole to compensation for a remainder no one can live or work in.
• The project's incentive: the rule disciplines alignment design: a route that clips fifty houses buys fifty whole houses if the owners so elect, so planners route around dwellings where engineering permits, which is the provision's quiet, preventive function.
• Interaction with the award: where the whole is acquired on the owner's election, the whole is valued and compensated on the ordinary Sections 26 to 30 arithmetic, the building under Section 29's engineer-valued head, and the R&R package follows displacement as usual.
• For the examiner: Section 94 pairs with Section 28's severance head as the Act's two answers to partial takings: severable land is taken in part and the injury priced; functional buildings are taken whole or not at all, at the owner's election.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

• Severance under Section 28 (Topic 39): the companion for divisible land
• Valuation of buildings (Topic 40): pricing the whole once taken
• The LARR Authority (Topics 70 to 73): the referee of part-or-whole
• Possession (Topic 61): the stage the reference holds