Delhi Development Authority vs. Shri Sunil Khatri & Ors.
Background
Land in Village Chattarpur, Delhi, was notified for acquisition in 1980 for the planned development of Delhi, with an award announced in 1987. Over the following decades, the acquisition was challenged in a tangled web of writ petitions and Supreme Court appeals (Balak Ram, Abhey Ram, Gurdip Singh Uban-I and II, Sudan Singh, Balbir Singh, among others), some of which briefly quashed the underlying Section 6 notification before those rulings were themselves set aside by later Supreme Court decisions. The respondent land owners obtained an interim stay of dispossession in their own writ petition in 1999. When the new 2013 Land Acquisition Act came into force with Section 24(2) (which deems acquisition proceedings lapsed if possession was not taken or compensation not paid for five years), the Delhi High Court held in 2014 that the acquisition of this land had lapsed. DDA appealed to the Supreme Court.
Decision Breakdown
The Court traced the entire, decades-long litigation history and concluded that the land owners' own interim stay orders, obtained through their own writ petition, were what prevented DDA from taking possession, meaning there was no "stay-free" period of five years before the 2013 Act came into force that could trigger a lapse under Section 24(2). Relying on its Constitution Bench ruling in Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal, the Court applied the equitable principle that a litigant cannot benefit from delay caused by their own interim orders ("no one can take advantage of their own wrong"), and that the government cannot be penalized for being disabled by a court's own stay from acting. It also clarified that certain conflicting precedents (Sudan Singh/Balbir Singh) which had suggested the entire acquisition notification stood quashed had themselves been overruled by later three-judge Bench rulings (Abhey Ram, Gurdip Singh Uban-I and II), so the land owners could not rely on them. The appeal was allowed, the High Court's order set aside, and the land owners' writ petition (claiming lapse) was dismissed.
Lesson Learnt
A land owner who obtains a court stay preventing the government from taking possession cannot later claim that the resulting delay caused the acquisition to "lapse" under the law: a party cannot profit from delay of its own making, and courts will exclude periods covered by such self-obtained interim orders when computing statutory deadlines like the five-year lapse period under Section 24(2) of the 2013 Land Acquisition Act.