The Supreme Court turned the clock back to the objection stage in 2016. The objections were still undecided in 2024
An urgency clause in 2002, an award in 2004, no compensation ever paid, and the landowners still in possession. The Madhya Pradesh High Court holds the acquisition lapsed under both the old Act and the new.
Compulsory acquisition works by stages, and each stage is a safeguard. A notification under Section 4 announces the intention. Objections under Section 5-A give the landowner a hearing. A declaration under Section 6 commits the State. An award under Section 11 fixes compensation, and possession follows payment. Section 17 lets the State skip the hearing where the need is urgent — the one provision in the chain that removes a safeguard rather than supplying one.
On 24 September 2026 Justice Sandeep N. Bhatt decided two connected writ petitions about a Scheme where the urgency was invoked in 2002 and, twenty-four years later, nothing had been completed: no compensation paid, possession disputed, and the objections the higher courts had restored still not decided.
Village Kumerdi, Scheme No. 139
The petitioners own agricultural land at Village Kumerdi, Tehsil Sanwer, District Indore. The Indore Development Authority resolved to prepare Town Development Scheme No. 139 under the Madhya Pradesh Nagar Tatha Gram Nivesh Adhiniyam, 1973, and published a draft scheme in May 1999.
The acquisition itself proceeded under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. A declaration under Section 6 was published on 29 October 2002 for 93.561 hectares for Scheme No. 139. On 23 November 2002 the Land Acquisition Officer wrote to the IDA for issuance of notices under Section 9 to the landowners. Three days later, on 26 November 2002, the Officer summarily rejected the petitioners’ objections on the ground of urgency under Section 17 — which took away their right to be heard under Section 5-A.
An award under Section 11 followed on 23 November 2004, passed without any Section 5-A hearing. The judgment records two facts about it that were never displaced: no compensation has been paid to the petitioners to date, and the petitioners remain in possession of the land.
Twenty-two years of litigation
The chronology set out in the judgment is worth reading as a study in how an acquisition can remain suspended indefinitely.
The petitioners challenged the acquisition by writ petition, which was dismissed on 21 June 2004. In October 2005 the Supreme Court, in SLP (C) Nos. 21580-82 of 2005, granted status quo in their favour. On the very day that order was passed, the IDA claims to have taken possession through a mauka panchnama and kabja rasid. The petitioners disputed it, pointing out that the witnesses who signed the panchnama are residents of Village Bhaurasala, a significant distance from the land at Village Kumerdi, and that neither they nor the other concerned landowners signed it.
The Court noted a small but telling circumstance on that dispute: on the same day the petitioners applied to the Land Acquisition Officer and the Collector giving intimation of the Supreme Court’s status quo order — and had possession in fact been taken, there would have been no need to serve that communication. The Collector wrote to the Tehsildar the next day to comply with the status quo order.
After the Madhya Pradesh Uchcha Nyayalaya (Khand Nyaypeeth Ko Appeal) Adhiniyam, 2005 created an intra-court appeal, the petitioners were given liberty to file a writ appeal, and Writ Appeal No. 321 of 2006 was decided by a Division Bench on 26 April 2010. That order was upheld by the Supreme Court on 10 February 2016, which granted liberty to approach the authorities.
The effect of those two orders is the hinge of the case. Together, the Bench held, the High Court and the Supreme Court turned the clock back and granted the petitioners liberty to raise objections under Section 5-A read with Section 48 of the 1894 Act in respect of the land not acquired for MR-10 and the flyover. In other words, as regards the remaining land, the position is as if no award had been passed at all.
The petitioners filed their objections on 4 March 2016.
Eight years of silence
Those objections were required to be decided within three months. They were not decided at all.
For the first time, on 6 May 2024, a notice for hearing on the Section 5-A objections was issued — and, the Court found, by an authority that was not competent to issue it. The State Government, it held, is guilty of inaction for a prolonged period of about eight years.
Throughout, interim protection continued: through the writ petition, the letters patent appeal filed in July 2004, the Supreme Court’s status quo of October 2005 and its continuation in August 2006, the writ appeal decided in 2010, the further SLP, the writ petition of 2016 and the orders extending interim relief in 2017 and 2021. The interim relief was still running because the Section 5-A objections were still pending.
Why the IDA’s authority did not help it
The IDA relied on Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal, the Constitution Bench decision on when an acquisition lapses. Justice Bhatt held it distinguishable on facts and law in several ways, and — in an inversion worth noting — found that on this record it supported the petitioners.
The most distinguishable feature, he held, is that here the State invoked the urgency clause under Section 17 and allegedly completed possession by passing the award on 23 November 2004; but the Division Bench’s order of 26 April 2010, upheld by the Supreme Court on 10 February 2016, turned the clock back to the objection stage. Once the petitioners were permitted to file Section 5-A objections in 2016 in respect of the remaining land, the award qua that land could not be treated as having been passed.
He then took the IDA to paragraph 226 of its own authority. Since the clock had been turned back to the stage of filing objections, and since the State is entitled to issue more than one notification under Section 6 of the 1894 Act, the award passed under Section 11 does not attain finality in those circumstances.
The exclusion of the period of interim relief — the usual answer to a delay argument, and the one the settled authorities support — could not bridge the gap either, because the delay complained of was not the litigation. It was the eight years after the litigation ended, during which nothing was decided.
The finding
Considering the material on record, the Court held that there is inaction on the part of the respondent Authority; that consequently neither has possession been taken over, nor has compensation been paid to the petitioners; and that the land acquisition proceedings have lapsed both under the old Land Acquisition Act, 1894 — there being a time lag of more than one year between the Section 4 notification and no declaration under Section 6 to date — and under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.
The two statutory tests converge on the same two facts. Under the 2013 Act, an acquisition lapses where the award was made five years or more before its commencement and either physical possession has not been taken or compensation has not been paid. Here neither had happened, on a record where the panchnama was disputed, the award predated the commencement by nearly a decade, and not a rupee had been paid in twenty-two years.
The order
Both petitions were allowed in terms of the main prayer: a writ of certiorari quashing and setting aside the land acquisition proceedings initiated under the 1894 Act in respect of the petitioners’ land at Village Kumerdi, with liberty to the petitioners to use their land as they wish. The alternative prayer — a mandamus for a fresh award under the 2013 Act — did not arise.
Shri Vijay Assudani appeared for the petitioners, Ms. Mini Ravindran for the IDA and Shri Shrey Raj Saxena, Deputy Advocate General, for the State. The signed order is to be kept in the file of W.P. No. 31107 of 2023, with a copy in the connected W.P. No. 1104 of 2024.
The judgment is a reminder of what an urgency clause costs when it is invoked and then not acted on. Section 17 exists so that a project that genuinely cannot wait does not have to. Used here, it removed a hearing in 2002 for a scheme that, a quarter-century later, had still not paid for the land or taken it — and when the higher courts restored the hearing it had removed, the State let eight more years pass before issuing a notice, through an officer who could not lawfully issue one.