The 2014 Ordinance and Its Repromulgations

Within a year of the Act's commencement, a new government tried to rewrite its heart by ordinance: the RFCTLARR (Amendment) Ordinance, promulgated on 31 December 2014, exempting five great categories of projects from consent and the SIA, and softening half a dozen other provisions. Promulgated, repromulgated twice, and allowed to die in August 2015, the Ordinance is the Act's constitutional stress test and the origin of everything in Topics 95 and 96. This note covers what it changed, its three lives, and what survived its death.

1. What the Ordinance Changed

Change	Content
The new Section 10A	The appropriate Government could exempt five categories of projects from the consent requirement, the SIA chapter and the food-security safeguard: defence; rural infrastructure including electrification; affordable housing and housing for the poor; industrial corridors; and infrastructure projects including PPP projects where the Government owns the land
Private entity for private company	The consent and purchase provisions widened from "private company" to "private entity", catching proprietorships, partnerships and trusts
Section 24(2) exclusion	Periods spent under court or tribunal stays, and periods where possession lay with the court's own processes, excluded from the five-year lapse computation
Section 87 recast	Prosecution of government servants routed through the prior-sanction discipline of Section 197 of the Code of Criminal Procedure
Section 101 stretched	Return of unutilised land after five years or the period specified for setting up the project, whichever is later
Section 105(3) substituted	The Act's compensation and R&R provisions applied directly to the Fourth Schedule enactments from 1 January 2015, the one universally welcomed change

2. The Three Lives and the Death

First promulgation, 31 December 2014: days before the Fourth Schedule deadline, the Government citing the alignment of compensation as the urgency; the exemption architecture travelled with it.
The Bill and the second life: the replacement Amendment Bill passed the Lok Sabha on 10 March 2015 with nine softening amendments, stalled in the Rajya Sabha, and the Ordinance was repromulgated on 3 April 2015 incorporating the Lok Sabha's changes.
The third life and the lapse: repromulgated again on 30 May 2015 while a Joint Parliamentary Committee examined the Bill; with no Rajya Sabha majority and the political cost mounting, the Government announced in August 2015 that the Ordinance would be allowed to lapse on 31 August 2015, and it did.
The rescue of the good part: the lapsed Ordinance's one consensual achievement, Fourth Schedule alignment, was preserved by the Removal of Difficulties Order of 28 August 2015 (Topic 88); the exemptions died at the Centre and migrated to the States (Topic 96).

3. The Constitutional Shadow

The episode is studied for more than its land-law content. Repromulgation: an ordinance re-issued twice because the legislature would not pass its substance sits uneasily with D.C. Wadhwa's condemnation of ordinance raj, and the later Constitution Bench in Krishna Kumar Singh (2017) confirmed that repromulgation is a fraud on the Constitution, the 2015 sequence is the modern casebook example the judgment's principle condemns, though the Ordinance died before any test. Ordinance against a flagship statute: using Article 123 to suspend the operative heart, consent and the SIA, of a law passed with cross-party support a year earlier posed the democratic question in its sharpest form, and the answer came politically: the measure could not survive a chamber the Government did not control. What the death proved: the 2013 Act's core turned out to be ordinance-proof in practice, protected not by any entrenchment but by the Rajya Sabha's arithmetic and the issue's electoral charge, a civics lesson the State-amendment era then complicated (Topic 96).

⚠ Key point

The RFCTLARR (Amendment) Ordinance, 31 December 2014: a new Section 10A exempting defence, rural infrastructure, affordable housing, industrial corridors and infrastructure-PPP projects from consent, SIA and the food-security bar; private entity for private company; stay-exclusion in Section 24(2); Section 197 CrPC sanction in Section 87; Section 101 stretched to the project's own timeline; and Fourth Schedule alignment from 1 January 2015. Repromulgated 3 April and 30 May 2015, it lapsed on 31 August 2015; the alignment survived through the 2015 Order, and the exemption agenda moved to the States.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

The 2015 Amendment Bill (Topic 95): the Ordinance's parliamentary vehicle
State amendments (Topic 96): where the agenda went
The 2015 Order (Topic 88): the rescued alignment
Legislative history (Topic 4): the Act the Ordinance tried to unwind