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2005 (11) TMI 490
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....SLP (Civil) Nos.17874-75 of 2004. The Writ Petitioners before the High Court have also filed a petition which is numbered as SLP (Civil) 18773 of 2004. Since all the petitions arise from a common judgment, they were heard together and are being disposed of by this judgment. For sake of convenience the land owners are being referred to as the writ petitioners in this judgment. The other main parties are the Competent Authority and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and they will be referred to as such in the judgment. 3. The subject matter of these appeals is the compulsory acquisition of certain lands belonging to the writ petitioners by the Central Government vide Notification dated 11th June, 1998 under Section 3A of the National Highways Act, 1956 (hereinafter referred to as the 'Act'). The writ petitioners challenged the acquisition of their lands on various grounds. The Division Bench of the High Court by its impugned judgment dated 7th April, 2004 disposed of the writ petition holding the impugned Notification regarding compulsory acquisition of land to be bad in law. However, keeping in view the fact that possession of the acquired land had already been....
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....the Notification. In order to appreciate the rival contentions it is necessary to reproduce some portions of the Appendix. 5. The Appendix contains a long list of various portions of lands sought to be acquired. The list runs into more than 10 pages in the paper book. We have chosen to reproduce only a small portion of the Appendix in order to appreciate the rival contentions of the learned counsel for the parties. The learned counsel for the writ petitioners submitted that the purpose of giving a brief description of the land sought to be acquired is that the person whose land is to be taken away, should at least know what he is being deprived of. This becomes all the more necessary when only a part of the land out of a bigger chunk of land is sought to be acquired. A reference to the Tables forming part of the Appendix, which according to the acquiring Authority contain brief description of the land, will show that under various heads, only part of bigger chunks of land is being acquired. If the entire land falling in a particular survey is acquired, there cannot be any problem of identification of land. But when only a part of land out of larger tract of land is sought to be ac....
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....the Competent Authority had really no answer to the problem demonstrated above about identification of land where only part of a larger chunk of land was being acquired. Faced with this difficulty and in an effort to ensure that the impugned Notification is upheld, the learned counsel appearing for the Competent Authority raised various subsidiary issues which according to him are sufficient to non-suit the Writ Petitioners. They are : (1) Delay on part of writ petitioners in challenging the Notification under Section 3A(1); (2) Failure to file objections under section 3C within twenty one days as prescribed in sub-section (1); (3) Applying for compensation for the acquired land giving full details of the lands sought to be acquired which shows that land owners knew all the details about the land under acquisition and the objection regarding absence of proper description of land sought to be acquired in the impugned Notification is not open to them; (4) On failure of the land owners to file objections under Section 3C (1), the Competent Authority submitted a report to the Central Government and the Central Government issued a declaration that the land should be acquired for....
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....th the law. 8. While dealing with the question of brief description of land in the acquisition notifications, reference was made to some judgments of this Court where acquisition Notifications under Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act had come up for consideration on account of challenge being leveled on ground of vagueness of the Notifications. In most of these cases, Plan of the area under acquisition was made part of the notifications to show that the requirement of description of land was met. This lead us to inquire whether there was any site plan forming part of the impugned Notification. 9. The availability of a Plan would have made all the difference. If there is a Plan, the area under acquisition becomes identifiable immediately. The question whether the impugned Notification meets the requirement of brief description of land under Section 3A(2) goes to the root of the matter. The High Court rightly observed : " .it is just not possible to proceed to determine the necessity of acquisition of a particular plot of land without preparation of a proper Plan." The Appendix to the impugned Notification shows that in many cases small parts of larger chunks of land have been n....
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....ner. Without this knowledge no objections regarding use of land could be filed. Since the objection regarding use of the land had been given up by the writ petitioners, we need not go any further in this aspect. We would, however, like to add that unlike Section 5A of the Land Acquisition Act,1894 which confers a general right to object to acquisition of land under Section 4 of the said Act, Section 3C(1) of the National Highways Act gives a very limited right to object. The objection can be only to the use of the land under acquisition for purposes other than those under sub-section 3A(1). The Act confers no right to object to acquisition as such. This answers the argument advanced by the learned counsel for the NHAI that failure to file objections disentitles Writ Petitioners to object to the acquisition. The Act confers no general right to object, therefore, failure to object becomes irrelevant. The learned counsel relied on the judgment of this court in Delhi Administration vs. Gurdip Singh Uban & Others [(1999) 7 SCC 44]. In our view, this judgment has no application in the facts of the present case where right to object is a very limited right. The case cited is a case under ....
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.... had nothing to do with ownership issues. So far as details of land under acquisition contained in the claim is concerned, it is based on material contained in the impugned Notification and the Appendix. Filing of such a claim by somebody who had no authority to do so, cannot deprive the owners of their right to challenge the acquisition of the lands owned by the Company. Therefore, neither delay in filing the Writ Petition nor filing of claim for compensation can stand in the way of the Writ Petitioners in seeking relief in these proceedings. 13. About the argument based on vesting of the land in the Central Government, it is to be seen that if the initial Notification is bad, all steps taken in pursuance thereof will fall with it. Vesting under Section 3D(2) arises on a declaration by the Central Government under Section 3D(1). The declaration is the result of disposal of objections under Section 3C. Each step is a consequence of earlier step and in that sense all the steps are linked to initial Notification for acquisition under Section 3A(1) and (2). This initial Notification has been held to be not in accordance with law. When the foundation goes rest of the edifice falls. Th....
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....se the Division Bench observed in its order dated 27th March,2003 that it never dealt with question of possession. The result is that taking possession of the land sought to be acquired cannot be said to be in accordance with law in this case and does not improve matters for the NHAI. 15. At this stage we would like to note that the learned counsel appearing for the writ petitioners made reference to a publication in the nature of a brochure issued by the West Bengal Government wherein it is mentioned that motels/shops/petrol pumps etc. will also come up in the area where the acquired land is situate. On this basis it was sought to be argued that such use of the acquired land would be contrary to the use mentioned in Section 3A of the Act and, therefore, is not permissible. There was lot of controversy on this aspect between the parties particularly, on the ground that this plea was being taken at this belated stage when the respondents had no opportunity to give a proper reply thereto. We have mentioned this only for the reason that the issue has come up during the course of hearing. We do not consider it necessary to go into this aspect, in view of the fact that we have held in ....