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Land & Building Department, Govt. of NCT of Delhi v. M/s Green Finance Pvt. Ltd. & Ors.

Civil Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Civil Appeal No. 9424 of 2016)Decided 20 Sept 2016
Civil Appeal No. 9424 of 2016
Justice Kurian Joseph · Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman

Background

This appeal, by the Land & Building Department of the Government of NCT of Delhi, arose from the same underlying land dispute with Green Finance Pvt. Ltd. as the Delhi Development Authority's connected appeal (Civil Appeal No. 9422 of 2016, decided the same day). The Department, as the state authority in the acquisition process, separately challenged a finding that the acquisition of the land had lapsed.

Decision Breakdown

The Court held that the issue was already settled against the appellants by its own earlier judgments in Civil Appeal No. 8477 of 2016 and Civil Appeal No. 5811 of 2015, and noted that the related appeal filed by the requisitioning authority, the DDA, had already been dismissed by the Court. Following that precedent, this appeal too was dismissed. As in the connected DDA matter, the Court gave the appellants one year's liberty to initiate fresh acquisition proceedings under Section 24(2) of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 by issuing a fresh Section 11 notification, failing which possession (if held by the appellants) was to be returned to the original land owner.

Lesson Learnt

Where multiple government authorities are jointly involved in one acquisition (here, both the requisitioning authority and the land administration department), a lapse of acquisition under the 2013 Act applies uniformly to all of them: each authority's separate appeal on the same facts will be decided the same way.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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