Settlement in Land Acquition Cases

The Need for an effective settlement in land acquisition cases is one of the key areas which the Government has been finding hard. On one hand the emerging need of acquiring private land for public interest purpose on the other hand doing it in a speedy and cost efficient manner. The bottlenecks in law would be made clear once the new Land Acquisition policy comes to the foray. However the burning issue of providing adequate protection and more importantly compensation to the people whose land are acquired assumes importance in a significant way inspite of the larger public interest involved. Most of the land acquisition draws aire from the public for the reason that the government acts as the aggressor repressing the actions of the local community. Indeed politicization and policization are instrumental for such a scenario.

The Government are faced with the challenge of balancing the interest of different sections of the community, especially when one side is a corporate which can bring in big time investment. A few people acts smart especially in cases where their records show less amount than the actual price to avoid stamp duty, which are brought to light while acquiring the land. The government offers amounts in tune with records which would obviously not meet the persons interest or satisfies his wants. At this juncture, both of them normally take the hep of courts, which would get dragged leading to delayed justice or injustice to either of them. It is in such scenarios the government takes the initiative to conduct adalats for settling the disputes. However it is a hard fact that no effective settlement are done because of the inept attitude in handling such issues.

Therefore it is important to have expert and trained mediators for handling such issue who can work out a common platform for settlement balancing the interest of the government and the clients. The success rate would be higher in such cases compared to the existing situation, which generally revolves around the court, with neither parties getting the required wants.

The Government has to take an approach wherein while framing their land acquisition policies in furtherance of settlement of cases amicably. This can reduce the pendency of cases and also save a large amount of public money for the exchequer. The need to encourage Alternative Dispute Resolution is inevitable in this scenario.