The National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy, 2007 and Its Legacy

Before rehabilitation was law it was policy, and the National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy, 2007 was the best version policy ever reached: a genuine entitlement framework, undone by the one thing no policy can supply, enforceability. The 2013 Act is the NRRP translated into statute, and the policy still matters where the Act does not reach. This closing note of Part E covers the policy's scheme, its failure mode, what the Act took from it, and its continuing uses.

1. From 2003 to 2007

The National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation for Project Affected Families, 2003 was the first all-India framework, modest in benefits and trailing the big displacing sectors' own packages. Its successor, the NRRP 2007, rebuilt the subject: it applied to projects displacing large numbers of families (the policy's thresholds, of the order of four hundred families en masse in the plains and two hundred in hilly, tribal and Scheduled Areas), and for them it prescribed a Social Impact Assessment, dedicated administration, an Administrator and Commissioner for R&R, project-level committees, an Ombudsman for grievances, and an entitlement menu running from house sites and land-for-land where available to subsistence allowances, transportation costs, and preference for employment, the whole architecture the 2013 Act's Chapter V now wears in statutory form.

2. The Failure Mode

No rights, no remedies: the NRRP conferred no cause of action; a family denied its package had nowhere to sue, and implementation depended on the displacing authority applying the policy to itself.
Thresholds as escape: entitlements triggered by mass displacement invited mass displacement to be counted differently, phased, or kept under the line.
Separation from acquisition: the policy lived beside the 1894 Act, not inside it, so the land could be taken first and rehabilitation negotiated after, the sequence the 2013 Act's declaration lock and possession gate exist to reverse.
The lesson legislated: the 2007 twin Bills tried to codify the policy and reform the 1894 Act in separate statutes and lapsed; the 2013 Act's single-statute design is the NRRP's failure applied as a drafting principle.

3. What the Act Took

NRRP 2007 element	Where it lives in the 2013 Act
Social Impact Assessment for displacing projects	Chapter II: SIA for every acquisition, not only mass displacement
Administrator and Commissioner for R&R	Sections 43 and 44, with the social audit added
Project-level R&R committees	Section 45, at the 100-acre threshold
Entitlement menu: housing, allowances, livelihood support	The Second Schedule, as enforceable minima
Resettlement-area amenities	The Third Schedule's twenty-five items and Section 32
Grievance machinery (the policy's Ombudsman)	The LARR Authority, a court-substitute with reference and appeal
Special care for tribal displacement	Sections 41 and 42, with Gram Sabha consent
National oversight	The National and State Monitoring Committees, Sections 48 to 50

4. Continuing Relevance

The NRRP was not repealed by the Act, and it keeps three uses. The gaps: displacement that the Act does not reach, projects on government land with no acquisition, pre-2014 projects completing their rehabilitation, categories a State amendment has carved out of Chapter II, still has the policy as its governing framework and its floor of legitimate expectation. The benchmark: courts and commissions read the policy as the articulated standard of humane resettlement for periods and projects the Act does not govern, and the Narmada line of cases shows rehabilitation packages being enforced as conditions of the projects that promised them. The comparison: for study, the policy-to-Act movement is the subject's best single illustration of why rights beat schemes: the same entitlements, nearly the same administrators, transformed in force the day they acquired a statute, an award, and a tribunal. That transformation is Part E's whole story, and the reason the 2013 Act's R&R chapters are drafted as machinery rather than exhortation.

⚠ Key point

The NRRP 2007 (successor to the 2003 policy) built the modern R&R architecture, SIA, Administrator and Commissioner, project committees, an Ombudsman, an entitlement menu, but as policy without rights or remedies, triggered only by mass-displacement thresholds and living outside the acquisition statute. The 2013 Act legislated the architecture: universal SIA, Sections 43 to 45's administration, the Second and Third Schedules as enforceable minima, the LARR Authority in the Ombudsman's place, and monitoring committees. The policy survives as the framework and benchmark for displacement the Act does not reach.

5. Related Topics and Provisions

Evolution of the law (Topic 2): the policy era in the lineage
R&R overview (Topic 46): the architecture in its statutory form
Legislative history (Topic 4): the lapsed 2007 Bills
Development-induced displacement (Topic 110): the record the policies answered