The Power to Amend the Schedules: Section 106

The Act keeps its living parts in Schedules, the compensation tariff, the entitlement menu, the amenity list, the exempted enactments, and Section 106 lets them be updated by notification rather than amendment Act. But the power carries the statute's most elegant one-way valve: Schedules may be amended without in any way reducing the compensation or diluting the provisions relating to compensation or rehabilitation and resettlement. The figures can climb; they cannot fall. This note covers the power, its ratchet, and its uses.

1. The Power

• Who and how: the power is exercised by notification, with the parliamentary laying discipline the Act attaches to its delegated instruments, executive updating under legislative watch.
• Over what: the Schedules: the First (compensation), Second (R&R entitlements), Third (resettlement amenities), the mechanism by which the 2013 figures, the 3,000-rupee subsistence, the 50,000-rupee allowances, the five-lakh option, the 2,000-rupee annuity, can be revised as money changes value, without reopening the statute on the floor of the House. (The Fourth Schedule has its own add-and-omit power in Section 105(2), with its own discipline.)
• The ratchet: the amending power is conditioned in its grant: no reduction of compensation, no dilution of the compensation or R&R provisions, the Schedules can only be amended upward or sideways, never against the affected family.

2. The Ratchet's Significance

Delegated powers to amend Schedules are common; a delegated power that can move in only one direction is not, and Section 106's condition does three kinds of work. Constitutionally, it answers the excessive delegation objection in advance: the legislature has not handed the executive the Act's substance, because the substance, the floor of entitlements, is exactly what the delegate cannot touch; the delegation is of generosity alone. Practically, it makes the Schedules a safe place for numbers: inflation adjustment, new allowance heads and richer amenity norms need no legislative season, while the affected family's baseline is notification-proof. Interpretively, it states the Act's temperament in a single clause, the same floor-not-ceiling character that Sections 107 and 108 express federally (States may do better, families may opt for better) and that the Second Schedule's own minima carry: everywhere the statute delegates, it delegates upward. A notification purporting to trim an entitlement would be ultra vires the section on its face, and the condition supplies the measure: not whether the change is styled rationalisation, but whether any affected family receives less than before.

3. Working Notes

• Where to look: the operative figures for any acquisition are the Schedules as amended to date, plus the State's own enhancements under its Section 107 laws and policies, the research sequence for every entitlement question.
• The multiplier's different home: the rural multiplier is fixed by the appropriate Government's notification under the First Schedule's own terms (Topic 37); Section 106 governs amendment of the Schedules' text, two instruments the examiner should keep distinct.
• The Fourth Schedule contrast: adding or omitting exempted enactments under Section 105(2) changes which statutes escape the Act, a far more consequential act than revising a figure, which is why it lives in its own provision with its own parliamentary discipline.
• For the examiner: Section 106 pairs with Section 108 as the Act's two ratchets: one on the Centre's notifications, one on the family's options, both pointing the same way, upward.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

• The Schedules themselves (Topics 37, 48 and 49): what the power revises
• Beneficial State laws (Topic 91): the federal ratchet beside this one
• Rule-making (Topic 92): the Act's wider delegated architecture
• Section 105(2) (Topic 87): the Fourth Schedule's own amending power