The situation on the ground
Imagine two farmers whose fields sit on either side of a village road. One plot is acquired for a national highway. The other, a few hundred metres away, is acquired for a state government housing project under the general land acquisition law. Both parcels are similar in size, soil quality and market value. Yet the compensation cheques that arrive can differ substantially — not because of anything the farmers did, but because of which statute the acquiring authority happened to invoke. This is the everyday consequence of a legal patchwork that has built up over decades, and it is precisely the anomaly the Supreme Court has now asked the Union Government to address.
What happened
In a recent matter concerning determination of market value for compulsorily acquired land, the Supreme Court observed that India's land acquisition framework is fragmented: while the general law — the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 — lays down a modern, multiplier-based formula for calculating market value and solatium, a number of "special" enactments under which the State also acquires land (for highways, railways, coal-bearing areas, electricity infrastructure, and similar public works) continue to rely on older, less generous methods of valuation inherited from the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act, 1894. The Court noted that this creates unequal outcomes for similarly placed landowners and urged the Centre to bring parity across these acquisition statutes, rather than leaving the matter to be litigated project by project, acquisition by acquisition. The observation was made as part of the Court's broader engagement with land acquisition compensation disputes that regularly reach it in appeal.
The law behind it
The starting point is Article 300A of the Constitution, which provides that no person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law. This is the constitutional anchor for the entire law of eminent domain in India today. It is worth remembering that the right to property was once a fundamental right — under the erstwhile Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31 — enforceable directly through Article 32. The Forty-Fourth Amendment removed property from Part III and re-enacted it as the more modest "constitutional" right in Article 300A, meaning deprivation is permissible so long as it is backed by a valid law, but the courts no longer test acquisition statutes against the heightened standard of a fundamental right. Article 31, though now largely of historical interest, remains part of the constitutional text and is important for understanding this transition, as are the saving provisions in Article 31A, which protect laws providing for acquisition of estates and agrarian reform measures from certain constitutional challenges.
Because Article 300A only demands that deprivation be backed by "law" — it does not itself prescribe how compensation must be calculated — the real content of a landowner's entitlement comes from ordinary legislation. Parliament's competence to legislate on acquisition and requisitioning of property flows from its position in the Concurrent List, exercised under the general distribution of legislative powers in Article 246, which allows both Parliament and State Legislatures to enact acquisition laws for different purposes. Historically this has produced not one law but many: the 2013 Act as the general code, and a cluster of subject-specific statutes for highways, railways, mining, power transmission and similar infrastructure, each carrying its own compensation mechanics, some of which never fully migrated to the 2013 Act's valuation formula.
This is where Article 14 becomes central to the Court's concern. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the laws, and permits classification only where it is founded on an intelligible differentia that has a rational nexus to the object sought to be achieved. When two landowners lose comparable land to the same sovereign power of eminent domain, exercised for comparable public purposes, but receive different compensation solely because of which statute was used, the classification becomes difficult to justify on any principled basis connected to the purpose of fair compensation. The Court's call for "parity" is, in essence, an invitation to Parliament to align valuation methods across acquisition statutes so that the guarantee of equal treatment is not defeated by legislative fragmentation.
How we got here
The Land Acquisition Act, 1894 was, for over a century, India's principal eminent domain statute. It was widely criticised for undervaluing land — market value was often pegged to registered sale deeds and circle rates that lagged far behind actual transaction prices, and the solatium (an additional sum meant to compensate for the compulsory nature of the taking) was modest. After decades of litigation and public criticism over inadequate compensation and poor rehabilitation, Parliament repealed the 1894 Act and replaced it with the 2013 Act, which introduced a multiplier applied to market value (higher for rural areas), mandatory solatium, and a rehabilitation and resettlement package for displaced families. This was widely seen as a significant advance in fairness towards landowners and displaced persons.
However, the 2013 Act did not automatically supersede all other acquisition statutes. Many special enactments predating or coexisting with the 2013 Act retained their own valuation clauses, some of which continued to mirror the older 1894 formula rather than the newer, more generous one. Parliament did subsequently direct that the compensation provisions of certain scheduled special Acts be aligned with the 2013 Act's formula, but this alignment has not been uniformly extended to every statute under which land is compulsorily acquired. The result is the very disparity the Supreme Court has now flagged: landowners under the general law enjoy a more favourable valuation regime than those whose land is taken under some of the older special statutes, even though the underlying constitutional guarantee — deprivation only by authority of law, fairly exercised — is meant to apply uniformly.
What it means in practice
For an ordinary landowner, the practical stakes are considerable. Whether one's land is acquired for a highway, a railway line, a mining project, or a housing scheme can materially change the cheque one receives, even where the land itself, its location and its use are indistinguishable from a neighbour's. This has fuelled years of litigation in which aggrieved landowners approach courts arguing that they ought to receive compensation calculated on the more favourable 2013 Act formula rather than the older mechanism under the special statute that governed their acquisition. Courts have sometimes granted relief on a case-by-case basis, but this has produced inconsistent outcomes rather than a systemic fix.
For law students and UPSC or judiciary aspirants, this episode is a useful lens for revising several interlinked themes: the post-44th Amendment status of the right to property as a constitutional (not fundamental) right under Article 300A; the doctrine of reasonable classification under Article 14 and how it applies to legislative, not merely executive, action; the distribution of legislative powers under Article 246 and the coexistence of a general acquisition code with special enactments; and the broader theme of eminent domain as an exercise of sovereign power constrained by statute rather than by an entrenched fundamental right. It also illustrates how the Supreme Court, while adjudicating individual disputes, sometimes uses its judgment to flag systemic legislative gaps and nudge the executive and Parliament towards reform, without itself rewriting the statute.
What to watch
The immediate question is whether the Union Government responds to the Court's suggestion with a legislative or executive measure — for instance, by extending the 2013 Act's compensation formula to a wider set of special acquisition statutes, or by amending the schedule that currently lists which special Acts must follow the newer formula. Any such change would require parliamentary action, and its scope, timing and the categories of statutes it covers remain to be seen. Litigants with pending compensation disputes under special enactments, and practitioners advising them, would do well to track whether this judicial nudge translates into concrete amendment, since until it does, the disparity the Court has identified will continue to play out acquisition by acquisition, before whichever court a landowner is able to approach.