The Rehabilitation and Resettlement Committee at Project Level: Section 45

For acquisitions large enough to remake a landscape, the Act builds a standing room where the administration and the affected sit at one table: where the acquired land is one hundred acres or more, the appropriate Government constitutes a Rehabilitation and Resettlement Committee under the Collector's chairmanship to monitor and review the R&R scheme's progress. This note covers the threshold, the composition, and what the Committee is for.

1. The Threshold and the Mandate

• When: where land equal to or more than one hundred acres is acquired for a project, the project scale at which rehabilitation becomes a programme rather than a transaction.
• What: to monitor and review the progress of implementation of the Rehabilitation and Resettlement scheme, and to carry out post-implementation social audits in consultation with the Gram Sabha in rural areas and the municipality in urban areas, continuous oversight while the scheme runs, and the look-back after it claims to be done.
• Under whom: the Collector's chairmanship, the officer who passed the R&R awards presiding over the body that asks whether they were honoured.

2. The Composition

The Committee's membership is the section's real design, every interest the scheme touches is given a chair:

• a representative of women residing in the affected area;
• a representative each of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes residing in the affected area;
• a representative of a voluntary organisation working in the area;
• a representative of a nationalised bank, the institution through which the awards' money moves;
• the Land Acquisition Officer of the project;
• the Chairpersons of the Panchayats or Municipalities located in the affected area, or their nominees;
• the Chairperson of the District Planning Committee or nominee;
• the Member of Parliament and Member of the Legislative Assembly of the area concerned, or their nominees;
• a representative of the Requiring Body; and
• the Administrator for Rehabilitation and Resettlement, as Member-Convenor.

3. What the Committee Is For

The Committee converts rehabilitation from correspondence into confrontation, in the useful sense: the women's and SC/ST representatives can say in the meeting what a household cannot say to a tehsil counter; the bank representative answers for payments that left the treasury but never reached accounts; the Requiring Body answers for the amenities its cost of acquisition was supposed to fund; and the elected members carry defaults into forums the administration cannot ignore. Its minutes become the running public record of implementation, the material the Commissioner's social audit, the National Monitoring Committee's review, and any later litigation will read. The design has limits worth stating plainly: the Committee monitors and reviews, it does not adjudicate, a family's individual grievance still travels through the Collector, the Commissioner and the Section 64 reference; and it exists only at the 100-acre threshold, so the mid-size acquisition relies on the Administrator's and Commissioner's ordinary machinery. Within those limits it is the Act's most practical transparency device: a standing meeting the affected attend by right.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

• Administrator and Commissioner (Topic 55): the machinery the Committee watches
• The R&R scheme (Topic 28): what is monitored
• Monitoring committees (Topic 59): the national tier
• Gender and R&R (Topic 111): the women's seat in context