The 2015 Amendment Bill, Section 10A and Why the Dilution Lapsed

The Ordinance needed a statute, and the RFCTLARR (Amendment) Bill, 2015 was the attempt: passed by the Lok Sabha with nine softening amendments, stopped in the Rajya Sabha, sent to a Joint Parliamentary Committee that never agreed, and dead with the sixteenth Lok Sabha. At its centre stood Section 10A, the five-category exemption that would have taken most Indian acquisition out of consent and the SIA. This note covers the Bill, the Lok Sabha's softenings, the arithmetic and arguments that killed it, and 10A's analytical anatomy.

1. Section 10A: The Anatomy

• The power: the appropriate Government may, by notification, exempt projects in five categories from Chapter II (SIA), Chapter III (food security) and the Section 2(2) consent requirement: (i) projects vital to national security or defence; (ii) rural infrastructure including electrification; (iii) affordable housing and housing for the poor; (iv) industrial corridors; and (v) infrastructure projects including PPP projects where the Government owns the land.
• The breadth problem: read together, the five heads covered the overwhelming share of real acquisitions, roads, power, housing, corridors, every PPP on government-owned land, so the exception would have eaten the rule: consent and SIA surviving mainly for the private factory buying through the State, the critics' central charge.
• What 10A never touched: compensation and R&R: even the Bill's authors left the First, Second and Third Schedule standards intact, the political settlement of 2013 holding firm on money while process was contested, the pattern the State amendments repeated.

2. The Lok Sabha's Nine Softenings

Passing the Lok Sabha on 10 March 2015 cost the Government nine official amendments, the significant ones: social infrastructure removed from the exempt infrastructure category (private hospitals and schools would not ride the exemption); industrial corridors confined to land up to one kilometre on either side of the designated road or railway, and to corridors set up by the Government or its undertakings; a duty to survey wasteland and arid land first before acquiring agricultural land, with the appropriate Government ensuring only the bare minimum agricultural land is taken; compulsory employment to at least one member of an affected family of farm labour; hearings for grievances and the restoration of some procedural texture the Ordinance had flattened. Softened, the Bill still could not cross the Rajya Sabha, and on 12 May 2015 it went to a Joint Parliamentary Committee; the Committee took extension after extension, never produced a consensus report, and the Bill lapsed with the sixteenth Lok Sabha's dissolution in 2019.

3. Why It Failed, and What the Failure Settled

• The arithmetic: the Government lacked a Rajya Sabha majority, and land was the one issue on which the opposition, farm organisations and sections of the ruling coalition's own base aligned; the 2015 Bihar campaign season made retreat cheaper than persistence.
• The argument: the Bill was framed by its critics as the repeal of the 2013 settlement's democratic half, consent and social scrutiny, while its defenders pleaded stalled projects and the costs of process; the JPC's paralysis preserved the disagreement in amber.
• The settlement it left: the Centre has not re-attempted the dilution since: the 2013 text stands at the Union level, the exemption agenda operates through Article 254(2) State amendments enacting 10A's substance locally (Topic 96), and the episode fixed the subject's politics: compensation is consensus, process is contest.
• For the examiner: 10A's five categories, the one-kilometre corridor limit, the social-infrastructure deletion and the JPC's dead end are the standard question's four marks.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

• The 2014 Ordinance (Topic 94): the Bill's parent
• State amendments (Topic 96): 10A's afterlife
• The consent requirement and SIA (Topics 12 and 16): what was at stake
• Critical evaluation (Topic 124): the process-versus-projects debate weighed