N.A.L. Layout Residents Association v. Bangalore Development Authority & Ors.
Background
In 1977-78 the Karnataka government acquired a large tract of land (including Survey No. 50) for the Bangalore Development Authority's BTM Layout scheme; possession was taken in 1984 and the land was sold to a housing cooperative society (the appellant-association's members) in 1985. Over the following two decades the original landowners repeatedly challenged the acquisition in court and lost every time, including two separate writ petitions specifically seeking withdrawal of Survey No. 50 from acquisition, both dismissed by the Karnataka High Court. Despite these losses, without disclosing them, the landowners then got the State Government to issue a fresh notification in 2001 withdrawing Survey No. 50 from the acquisition, and after a back-and-forth, a High Court Single Judge and Division Bench ultimately upheld that withdrawal.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that once possession of acquired land has been taken by the State and formally vested (as happened here in 1984, notified in the Gazette in 1985), the government's power under Section 48 of the Land Acquisition Act to "withdraw" land from acquisition can no longer be exercised: that power only exists before possession is taken. Because the landowners' own earlier writ petitions seeking exactly this relief had already been dismissed by the High Court years before (facts neither the Single Judge nor the Division Bench had considered in the later rounds), their fresh attempt to get the State to withdraw the land was itself impermissible. The Court set aside both the High Court's Division Bench and Single Judge judgments, dismissed the landowners' writ petition, and allowed the housing society's appeals, while leaving open, for the BDA to pursue separately, the question of whether society members were occupying more land than they were actually allotted.
Lesson Learnt
Once the government has taken physical possession of acquired land and the acquisition has become final, it legally cannot "undo" that acquisition later under provisions meant only for the pre-possession stage, and a party who has already lost the same claim in earlier litigation cannot simply resurrect it years later through a fresh representation to the executive.