Appropriate Government, Collector and Requiring Body: The Machinery of Acquisition

Every acquisition is a transaction among three actors: the appropriate Government that authorises, the Collector who executes, and the Requiring Body that wants and pays. The Act assigns each a distinct set of powers, duties and liabilities, and most procedural litigation is about one of them stepping outside its lane. This note maps the three, with the rehabilitation officers who complete the cast.

1. The Appropriate Government

• Which government: the Central Government for acquisition for the Union's purposes and its public sector undertakings, and where the land lies in more than one State; the State Government for all other acquisitions within the State. The allocation decides who prescribes rules, who notifies, and whose officers run the process.
• What it does: commissions the SIA (Section 4) and constitutes the expert group (Section 7); examines and approves proposals (Section 8); issues the preliminary notification (Section 11) and the declaration (Section 19); approves the R&R scheme; exempts acquisitions from SIA in Section 40 urgency cases (Section 9); and exercises the withdrawal power while possession has not been taken.
• Its discipline: the appropriate Government acts on the record the Act builds, SIA, expert appraisal, objections report, and its satisfaction at each stage is a jurisdictional fact, reviewable on the Sooraram grounds (Topic 6).

2. The Collector

"Collector" means the Collector of a revenue district and includes a Deputy Commissioner and any officer specially designated by the appropriate Government to perform the Collector's functions. The office carries the acquisition from notification to possession: publishing notices and conducting the preliminary survey (Section 12); updating land records; hearing objections through its report (Section 15); overseeing the census of affected families; issuing notices to persons interested (Section 21); conducting the award enquiry and making the land acquisition award (Section 23) within the Section 25 period; passing the R&R award (Section 31); ensuring the R&R process under the Administrator's scheme; taking possession (Section 38) only after compensation and R&R entitlements are paid or tendered as the Act requires; and making the reference to the LARR Authority (Section 64) when a person interested seeks it. The Collector is the Act's fiduciary moment-to-moment: an award made out of time lapses the acquisition (Section 25), and possession taken before the Act's preconditions is the classic illegality.

3. The Requiring Body

• Who: the company, body corporate, institution or Government department for whom land is acquired and at whose cost.
• What it bears: the cost of acquisition in its statutory breadth, compensation, the R&R package, administrative and SIA expenses, and the resettlement infrastructure, so the project internalises the social cost it creates.
• What it owes: performance of the R&R obligations the scheme assigns it, employment or annuity under the Second Schedule among them; possession is organised around those obligations being met, and the National and State monitoring bodies (Topics 59) watch the performance.
• What it cannot do: choose itself as beneficiary without the Act's gates, divert the land to another purpose (Section 99), or hold unutilised land past the Section 101 period; the Requiring Body takes the land on the Act's continuing terms.

4. The Rehabilitation Officers

Chapter V adds the R&R administration: the Administrator for Rehabilitation and Resettlement, an officer not below Joint Collector or equivalent, who conducts the R&R survey, prepares the draft R&R scheme (Section 16), holds its public hearing and submits it; the Commissioner for R&R, supervising the scheme's formulation and execution State-wide and conducting the post-implementation social audit; and for acquisitions of 100 acres or more, the project-level R&R Committee (Section 45) chaired by the Collector with affected-family, women's and elected representation (Topics 55 and 56 take these fully). The division of labour is deliberate: the officer who acquires is not left to grade his own rehabilitation.

5. Related Topics and Provisions

• Definitions map (Topic 10): where the actors are defined
• The acquisition procedure (Topics 24 to 35): the actors in sequence
• Administrator and Commissioner (Topic 55): the R&R administration in depth
• Possession and its preconditions (Topic 61): the Collector's strictest duty