Offences and Penalties under the Act: An Overview

A statute that moves this much land and money needs its own criminal chapter, and Sections 84 to 90 supply it: punishment for false information and fraudulent claims, penalties for contravening the Act's compensation and R&R duties, corporate and governmental liability with their classical defences, and a prosecution architecture that keeps the offences non-cognizable and complaint-driven. Part H begins with this map; the next notes take each provision in detail.

1. The Chapter's Map

Provision	Subject	Core content
Section 84	False information and mala fide action	False or misleading statements and forged documents in the Act's processes: imprisonment up to six months, fine up to one lakh rupees, or both; fraudulent R&R benefits recovered; disciplinary proceedings for mala fide Government servants
Section 85	Contravention of the Act	Contravention of the provisions relating to payment of compensation and rehabilitation and resettlement: the chapter's enforcement teeth against default in the Act's core duties
Section 86	Offences by companies	The company and every person in charge of its business deemed guilty, with the due-diligence and without-knowledge defences, and directors and officers liable where consent, connivance or neglect is shown
Section 87	Offences by Government departments	Where an offence is by a Government department, the head of the department answers unless the offence was without his knowledge or he exercised all due diligence
Sections 88 to 90	Prosecution architecture	Trial by magistracy of the prescribed level; offences non-cognizable; cognizance on complaint as the Act provides, with the Act's arrangements on who may complain and within what discipline

2. The Design

Both directions: the chapter faces claimants and State alike: the villager who manufactures a tenancy and the officer who acts mala fide are both answerable, false claims are punished and recovered, mala fide official action draws disciplinary consequences, and departmental defaults engage the head of the department.
Protecting the processes: the offences track the Act's information-heavy stages, the SIA's census, the claims under the Section 21 notice, the Section 22 compelled statements, the R&R entitlement records: where the statute runs on declarations, it criminalises their corruption.
Corporate realism: acquisition's private actors are mostly companies, and Section 86 imports the standard in-charge-and-responsible formula so the Requiring Body's defaults have human addresses, with honest management protected by the due-diligence defence.
Governmental candour: Section 87's head-of-department rule is the Act admitting that most acquisition wrongs are official wrongs; its knowledge-and-diligence defence keeps liability fault-based, and the provision's calibration was contentious enough that the 2014 to 2015 amendment effort sought to recast it toward a sanction-based scheme, which lapsed with the rest (Topic 94).
Restraint in enforcement: non-cognizable, complaint-driven prosecution keeps the chapter from becoming a harassment instrument in village disputes, the criminal law stands behind the Act's processes without roaming them.

3. Reading the Chapter in the Act's Scheme

The offences chapter is the fourth and last layer of the Act's enforcement design. The first layer is structural: the declaration lock, the possession gate and the land-use locks make default physically difficult. The second is financial: the premiums and interest make delay and short-payment expensive. The third is supervisory: the Commissioner's audit, the committees and the monitoring stack make failure visible. The criminal layer exists for what survives all three, deliberate falsehood, mala fides and obstinate contravention, and its calibration (modest imprisonment, meaningful fines, recovery, discipline) matches that residual role. For study, the chapter's details, the exact penalty quanta, the corporate and departmental formulas, the complaint and compounding arrangements, are Topics 81 to 84, where each section is taken with its text.

⚠ Key point

Sections 84 to 90: false information and forged documents in the Act's processes draw up to six months' imprisonment, a fine up to one lakh rupees, or both, with fraudulent R&R benefits recovered and disciplinary action for mala fide Government servants (Section 84); contravention of the compensation and R&R provisions is separately penalised (Section 85); companies answer through the persons in charge, with due-diligence defences (Section 86); Government departments answer through the head of the department (Section 87); and prosecution is magistracy-tried, non-cognizable and complaint-driven (Sections 88 to 90). The criminal layer backstops the Act's structural, financial and supervisory enforcement.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

Section 84 in detail (Topic 81): false information and mala fides
Section 85 in detail (Topic 82): the contravention offence
Companies and departments (Topic 83): Sections 86 and 87
Cognizance and compounding (Topic 84): Sections 88 to 90