A High Court appellate award cannot restart the Section 28-A clock, rules Supreme Court

A Division Bench rejects a re-determination claim filed 45 years after the award, holding that Section 28-A runs from a reference court decision and not from an appeal decided decades later.

Section 28-A of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 is a benevolent provision: it lets a landowner who never sought a reference piggyback on a neighbour’s enhanced compensation, provided he applies within three months. The question in New Okhla Industrial Development Authority v. Rajveer Singh was what that three-month clock can be measured from. On 21 September 2026, a Division Bench of Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K. Vinod Chandran held that it cannot be measured from a High Court’s decision in a first appeal. The Court allowed NOIDA’s appeal, set aside the order below and rejected the application under Section 28-A, closing a route by which an acquisition of 1977 was being reopened in 2022.

An award from 1977, an application from 2022

The lands in question were proceeded against under Section 4(1) read with Section 17 of the Act of 1894 and acquired. An award was passed on 15 February 1977, and the entire compensation was, admittedly, received by the predecessors-in-interest of the respondents. Those predecessors did not file any application for a reference under Section 18. That is the ordinary route by which a dissatisfied landowner has his compensation re-examined by a court, and it was not taken.

Others whose lands were acquired under the very same notification did seek a reference under Section 18. Their reference was made, but it was rejected by the Additional District Judge, Ghaziabad, by a judgment and decree dated 25 November 1981. An appeal followed under Section 54 of the Act, registered as First Appeal No. 458 of 1982 — and that appeal was disposed of only on 18 April 2022, some forty years later.

It was on the strength of that appellate decision that the respondents acted. On 23 May 2022, within three months of the First Appeal being disposed of, they filed an application under Section 28-A seeking re-determination of the compensation payable for their own land. The application was directed to be entertained and was allowed by the order under challenge. NOIDA, as the requisitioning authority which would bear the cost, brought the matter to the Supreme Court.

The six conditions the statute imposes

Section 28-A is not an open invitation to reopen compensation. The judgment sets out the conditions that must be satisfied before a re-determination can be sought, and they are cumulative. There must be an award made by the Court. By that award, compensation in excess of the amount awarded by the Collector under Section 11 must have been allowed to the applicant in that reference. The person moving the application must be interested in other land covered by the same notification under Section 4(1) to which the award relates. He must not himself have made an application to the Collector under Section 18. The application must be moved within three months from the date of the award on the basis of which re-determination is sought. And only one application may be moved under Section 28-A by an applicant.

Read as a set, those conditions describe a specific transaction: a landowner who stayed out of court borrows the benefit of a reference court’s enhancement obtained by a neighbour under the same notification, once, and quickly. The respondents satisfied several of them — they were interested in land under the same notification, and their predecessors had not sought a reference. The condition they could not satisfy concerned the nature of the decision they were relying on.

What Section 28-A was designed to do

The provision exists to prevent an inequity. Where one landowner obtains enhanced compensation on a reference, others whose land was taken under the same notification but who did not go to court are permitted to apply to the Collector for re-determination on the same basis. The limitation is short — three months from the date of the award on which the applicant relies.

The Court traced how far that entitlement extends. In Babua Ram, an application under Section 28-A had been restricted to the first award made after a reference under Section 18. That restriction was overruled in Pradeep Kumari, a three-Judge Bench decision, which held that successive awards of the reference court could also found an application. The right of re-determination, on that view, is not confined to the earliest award made by the court.

But widening the class of reference court awards is not the same as admitting appellate decisions. The Bench read Pradeep Kumari closely on this point, noting that one of the appeals there concerned an applicant who sought enhancement on the strength of a High Court award in a first appeal, and that the High Court, while extending the benefit, had referred instead to an award made by the District Judge in a separate land reference — impliedly rejecting the contention that an application would lie from an order in appeal. That approach was upheld by this Court.

The point had in fact been tested on the facts of Pradeep Kumari itself, and the Bench drew that out. In one of the matters there, the Collector had awarded enhanced compensation under Section 28-A equal to a subsequent award of February 1987, and the Union of India appealed. A separate applicant, Savitri Devi, sought the benefit of a High Court decision of 5 September 1986 rendered in an appeal. Her application under Section 28-A was dismissed by the Collector on the express ground that the provision would be available only on the basis of an award of the reference court, and that dismissal too travelled to the High Court. The High Court, dealing with both orders, took the wider view that all Section 28-A requires is an award made under Part III of the Act by the Court in which an excess amount is allowed, and that the provision nowhere says it must be the first such award.

When the matter reached this Court, the enhancement was extended by reference to an award made by a District Judge in a separate land reference rather than to the High Court’s appellate decision — an approach that accepted successive reference court awards while declining, in substance, to treat an appellate order as a foundation for Section 28-A.

Why an appellate order will not do

The Bench found its clearest answer in the structure of Section 28-A itself. Sub-section (3) provides a further remedy: if the award passed by the Collector under sub-section (2) is not acceptable to the applicant, he may seek a reference. That machinery presupposes a determination capable of being taken further.

It cannot sensibly operate, the Court reasoned, where the enhancement relied upon has been granted by the High Court in an appeal from an award made under Section 26. A litigant who founded his claim on a High Court decision and was then dissatisfied with the Collector’s re-determination would be seeking a reference against a figure derived from the highest court that had already spoken. The remedial scheme of sub-section (3) would be left without work to do.

The Court supported that reading with the three-Judge Bench in Pradeep Kumari, with Jose Antonio Cruz, and with the two-Judge Bench in Hansoli Devi, each pointing to the disentitlement of an application under Section 28-A founded on an order in appeal under Section 54 where enhancement has been granted under Section 26. Using an appellate order in this way, when the reference court had declined the reference, was described as a casus omissus — a gap the legislature had not provided for, and one that could not be filled by the court merely because the result seemed beneficial. The position in Banwari, that the beneficial legislation should not be stultified where a Section 18 reference is rejected, addressed a situation the statute did not contemplate here.

Judicial discipline and the coordinate bench

The judgment closes on a note of institutional discipline. The Court observed that a Court of Record is bound by an order passed at the first instance by a coordinate bench. The remark matters practically: it signals that the answer on Section 28-A is not to be revisited by benches of equal strength taking a different view on the same question, and that the consistency of the line running from Pradeep Kumari through Hansoli Devi is to be respected rather than worked around case by case.

The consequence for landowners is plain. A person who received his compensation in 1977 and never sought a reference cannot, four and a half decades later, revive a claim by waiting for somebody else’s appeal to be decided. The three-month window in Section 28-A attaches to a reference court award, and an appellate decision under Section 54 does not reopen it.

There is a limitation dimension too. Because the three-month window attaches to the award relied upon, allowing an appellate decision to serve as that award would make the period effectively open-ended: an acquisition could be reopened whenever a first appeal arising from some other landowner’s reference was finally decided, however long that took. On these facts the gap was forty-one years between the rejected reference and the disposal of the appeal.

For acquiring bodies the ruling restores a measure of finality. A development authority that has paid out on a 1977 award can now treat the compensation liability under that notification as closed against those who took their money and never sought a reference, rather than remaining exposed while unrelated appeals work their way through the courts.

Order

The Court allowed the appeal, set aside the impugned order, and rejected the application filed under Section 28-A of the Act of 1894. Pending applications, if any, were rejected.