DDA v. Tejpal: Section 24(2) lapse is conjunctive, and a change of law reopens nothing

In May 2024, a three-judge bench applied Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal to hold that deemed lapse under Section 24(2) requires both non-payment and non-possession, upheld the Delhi acquisitions, and held that a subsequent change in the law is no ground for condonation of delay.

Valkya Editorial· Legal Intelligence·14 June 2026·8 min read

Court: Supreme Court of India
Citation: 2024 INSC 456
Bench: Surya Kant, J., Dipankar Datta, J., Ujjal Bhuyan, J.
Decided: 1 May 2024

Provisions discussed

Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013 s.24Land Acquisition Act 1894Limitation Act 1963 s.5

The facts in brief

The litigation concerned land acquired for the planned development of Delhi. The acquisitions were carried out under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, across notifications spanning roughly half a century — from the late 1950s through the mid-2000s — with the Delhi Development Authority as the acquiring authority. When the 2013 Act came into force, it carried, in Section 24, a transitional provision dealing with acquisitions begun under the old Act but not concluded.

Section 24(2) provides that where an award under the 1894 Act was made five or more years before the commencement of the 2013 Act, but the physical possession of the land has not been taken or the compensation has not been paid, the acquisition proceedings shall be deemed to have lapsed. A flood of litigation followed across Delhi and the NCR, with landowners claiming that their acquisitions had lapsed and the land reverted to them.

The landowners here had obtained orders from the Delhi High Court declaring the acquisitions lapsed under Section 24(2). The DDA challenged those orders before the Supreme Court. A complicating feature was timing: the High Court orders had, in many cases, been passed on the strength of an earlier and since-overruled understanding of Section 24(2), and the DDA's challenges came after the law had shifted. The appeals came before a three-judge bench of Justices Surya Kant, Dipankar Datta and Ujjal Bhuyan, which delivered judgment in May 2024.

The Section 24(2) controversy

Section 24(2) generated one of the largest waves of property litigation in recent Indian history, and the controversy turned on a single grammatical and doctrinal question: are the two conditions for lapse — non-payment of compensation and non-taking of possession — disjunctive or conjunctive?

In Pune Municipal Corporation v. Harakchand Misirimal Solanki (2014), a three-judge bench had read the conditions disjunctively and had held, further, that compensation merely deposited in the treasury (rather than tendered to or paid to the landowner) did not count as "paid." On that reading, an acquisition lapsed if either possession had not been taken or compensation had not been paid in the strict sense — a reading that opened the door to lapse claims across vast tracts of acquired land.

The Constitution Bench in Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal (2020) overruled Pune Municipal Corporation. It held that the two conditions are conjunctive: lapse occurs only where compensation has not been paid and possession has not been taken. It also held that depositing compensation in the treasury is a valid mode of payment that defeats the non-payment limb, and that a landowner who refused to accept tendered compensation could not later complain of non-payment. The combined effect was to shut down the great majority of Section 24(2) lapse claims.

DDA v. Tejpal is the clean application of Manoharlal to the Delhi acquisitions.

What the Court held

The Court set aside the Delhi High Court orders that had declared the acquisitions lapsed and upheld the acquisitions. Applying Manoharlal, it held that lapse under Section 24(2) requires both non-payment of compensation and non-taking of possession; the landowners, satisfying at most one limb, could not bring their cases within the conjunctive test. The Court clarified, however, that upholding the acquisition does not deprive a landowner of compensation: where compensation remains unpaid, the landowner may still recover it, with interest.

On the computation of the five-year window, the Court reaffirmed that any period covered by an interim order — during which the authority was restrained from taking possession or completing the acquisition — is to be excluded. An acquiring authority cannot be penalised under Section 24 for inaction that the courts themselves compelled by injuncting it.

The exclusion of interim-order periods is more consequential than it first appears. The five-year window in Section 24 is calculated by looking back from the commencement of the 2013 Act to the date of the award under the old Act, and asking whether, in the interval, possession was taken and compensation paid. But an acquiring authority that has been restrained by an injunction cannot take possession or complete the acquisition while the restraint subsists. To count that period against the authority would penalise it for obeying the court's own order. The Court therefore held that the time covered by an interim order is excluded from the computation — a holding that protects authorities whose acquisitions were stalled not by their own inaction but by litigation the landowner initiated.

The most doctrinally significant holding concerned limitation. Many of the DDA's challenges were filed after the ordinary period of limitation, and the question was whether the change in the law — Manoharlal overruling Pune Municipal Corporation — could supply "sufficient cause" to condone the delay and reopen the High Court orders. The Court held that it could not.

A subsequent change in law cannot, by itself, constitute a sufficient cause for condonation of delay in seeking to reopen matters that have attained finality.

— Surya Kant, J.

The reasoning rests on the value of finality. Litigation must end. If every doctrinal shift by a larger bench reopened all the concluded cases that had relied on the overruled view, there would be no repose — the law would be in permanent retrospective motion, and rights settled under one understanding would be perpetually vulnerable to the next. A change in the law, the Court held, does not by itself furnish the "sufficient cause" that Section 5 of the Limitation Act requires; the party seeking condonation must show a real and sufficient explanation for its own delay, independent of the later evolution of the law.

Finality and the change-of-law argument

The change-of-law point is the most portable part of the decision. It is not confined to land acquisition; it applies wherever a party seeks to reopen a concluded matter on the strength of a subsequent precedent that would, had it existed earlier, have changed the outcome.

The temptation is obvious. A litigant who lost (or did not contest) under the old law, and who watches a larger bench later vindicate the position it might have taken, naturally feels aggrieved that finality should bind it to a rule the Supreme Court has now disowned. But the Court's answer is that finality is itself a substantive value, not a technicality. The prospect that any decided case might be reopened whenever the law moves would corrode certainty for everyone — including the parties who, in reliance on a concluded decision, have ordered their affairs around it. The change-of-law condonation argument is therefore rejected as a matter of principle, not merely on the facts.

That said, the Court's clarification that landowners may still recover unpaid compensation softens the edge of the result. Upholding an acquisition is not a windfall for the State at the landowner's expense; the landowner whose land has been validly acquired but whose compensation remains unpaid retains the right to be paid, with interest. What the landowner loses is the lapse claim — the attempt to reverse the acquisition and reclaim the land itself.

The distinction matters because the two remedies operate on different planes. A lapse under Section 24(2) is a drastic consequence: it undoes a completed acquisition, returns the land to the former owner, and may upset planned public works built on the assumption that the acquisition stood. A claim for unpaid compensation, by contrast, leaves the acquisition intact and simply enforces the State's monetary obligation. By confining the conjunctive-lapse test strictly while preserving the compensation remedy, the Court drew the balance where the 2013 Act's policy points: the public interest in completed acquisitions for planned development is protected, while the landowner's individual entitlement to be paid for land taken from it is not extinguished. The result is neither a forfeiture of the State's investment in development nor an expropriation of the landowner's right to compensation.

Why the decision matters

DDA v. Tejpal governs the enormous volume of Section 24(2) lapse litigation in Delhi and the NCR, and stands as the leading application of Manoharlal to a concrete body of acquisitions. For acquiring authorities — the DDA, DSIIDC, DMRC and their counterparts — it confirms that acquisitions are not undone by the disjunctive reading the courts have abandoned, and that interim-order periods are excluded from the lapse computation.

For landowners, it draws a clear line: the conjunctive test must be satisfied on both limbs to claim lapse, and the right that survives an upheld acquisition is the right to compensation, not the right to the land. And for litigation across every field, the decision supplies a crisp, frequently-cited statement that a doctrinal shift does not reopen finality — that the law's movement forward does not drag concluded cases back with it.