Penalty for Contravention of the Act: Section 85

Section 85 is the chapter's heaviest provision and its most pointed: contravening the provisions relating to payment of compensation or rehabilitation and resettlement is itself an offence, punishable with imprisonment of six months extending to three years, or fine, or both. The Act's two deliverables, money and rehabilitation, are placed under criminal guard. This note covers the offence, who commits it, and its place beside the Act's other enforcement layers.

1. The Offence

• The conduct: contravention of any of the provisions relating to payment of compensation or rehabilitation and resettlement, the offence tracks the Act's two promises: the First Schedule money and the Second and Third Schedule rebuilding.
• The punishment: imprisonment of six months which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both, the chapter's highest custodial exposure, and notably a term with a floor in its framing: this is the Act treating default on its core duties as real criminality, not a compoundable irritant.
• The contrast with Section 84: Section 84 punishes deceiving the process (six months, one lakh); Section 85 punishes defying it (up to three years), the lie and the default, separately criminalised, separately calibrated.

2. Who Commits It

The provisions "relating to payment of compensation or rehabilitation and resettlement" have duty-bearers on every side, and the offence follows the duty. The Requiring Body that starves the award, withholds the R&R package its cost of acquisition owes, or takes the benefit of possession while its Second Schedule obligations rot, is the provision's natural first address, prosecutable through Section 86's corporate formula and, by Section 90's express rule, on the complaint of the Collector, an authorised officer or any member of the affected family. Official duty-bearers are within the words too, the Act nowhere exempts them, and Section 87 supplies the departmental formula when the default is the department's, though in practice official failures are pursued through the disciplinary and supervisory layers at least as often as through prosecution. What the section is not is a debt-collection device: the unpaid award's primary remedies remain the Act's own, interest, the possession gate, the Authority, and prosecution is the escalation for contumacious default, which is exactly how a floor-bearing custodial offence should be used.

3. The Section at Work

• The paradigm cases: possession enjoyed for years with compensation unpaid and no deposit; a resettlement colony never built while the project operates; the monetary R&R entitlements of the landless simply never disbursed, each a continuing contravention of the payment and R&R provisions.
• Evidence from the Act's own record: the awards, the Section 38 windows, the Commissioner's social audit and the monitoring committees' minutes make the contravention documentary: Section 85 prosecutions are built from the acquisition's paper, which the Act helpfully makes public.
• The complaint route: offences being complaint-driven (Topic 84), the affected family's own right to complain against a Requiring Body under Section 90 is the provision's democratic trigger: the family the default starves can itself set the criminal law in motion.
• For the examiner: the quanta pair for memory: 84: six months or one lakh or both; 85: six months to three years or fine or both, deception against default.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

• Section 84 (Topic 81): the deception offence beside it
• Companies and departments (Topic 83): who answers in the dock
• Cognizance and complaints (Topic 84): the affected family's trigger
• The possession gate and interest (Topics 61 and 43): the civil layers this escalates from