On 2 January 2025, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held that where the State takes possession of land but pays no compensation for the better part of two decades, the prolonged deprivation violates Article 300A — and that although a Special Land Acquisition Officer cannot on his own shift the statutory date for fixing market value, a constitutional court under Articles 32, 226 or 142 may, in exceptional cases of inordinate State delay, direct that market value be reckoned as of a later date. On the facts, the Court fixed the value as on 22 April 2019. A digest of the holding and its place in the Article 300A line.
On 24 November 2020, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held that the Union's continued occupation of requisitioned land for 33 years after its requisitioning authority had lapsed was 'condoning lawlessness'. Justice S. Ravindra Bhat's judgment read Article 300A as standing on the same footing as Articles 21 and 265 — a guarantee of the supremacy of the rule of law — and directed possession to be restored within three months. The case turns on the distinction between requisition and acquisition.
On 16 May 2024, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held that the constitutional right to property under Article 300A is 'a net of intersecting sub-rights' — and that before depriving a person of property the State must honour seven procedural sub-rights: notice, hearing, a reasoned decision, public purpose, restitution or fair compensation, an efficient and expeditious process, and conclusion. Because Section 352 of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation Act, 1980 prescribes no procedure for acquisition, it can never be a valid power of acquisition, and the purported deprivation was without authority of law. A digest of the holding, the seven sub-rights, and their significance for land-acquisition practice.
On 9 August 2011, a five-judge Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia — with the judgment authored by Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan — upheld the Roerich Estate Acquisition Act 1996 and Section 110 of the Karnataka Land Reforms Act, and in doing so laid down the doctrinal foundation of Article 300A: a law depriving a person of property must be for a public purpose and must be just, fair and reasonable in conformity with the rule of law. Article 300A does not, in terms, mandate compensation, but the phrase 'authority of law' imports rule-of-law safeguards against arbitrary or confiscatory deprivation.
In 2011 the Supreme Court refused the State of Haryana's suit to be declared owner of a citizen's land by adverse possession, restored possession to the owner, and delivered a sweeping critique of the doctrine as irrational and disproportionate — reaffirming the right to property as a constitutional and human right.
On 2 November 2012, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held that even after the 44th Constitutional Amendment removed property from the list of fundamental rights, the right to property survives as both a human right in a welfare State and a constitutional right under Article 300A. The State had taken the appellants' land without acquisition or compensation; forcible dispossession without due process, the Court held, is unconstitutional — and the State cannot escape behind the very delay its own default produced.
On 8 January 2020, the Supreme Court held that the forcible dispossession of a citizen from her private property without following due process of law violates both the human right to property and the constitutional right under Article 300A. An illiterate widow's land had been taken for a road in 1967–68 with no acquisition and no compensation. A welfare State, the Court held, cannot plead the bar of limitation against a continuing wrong, nor perfect its title by adverse possession over its own citizen's land.
Valkya Editorial··8 min
Supreme CourtGujarat High Court; Supreme Court of India
On 22 July 2022, a two-judge Supreme Court bench directed GSTN to reopen the common portal for two months, allowing every aggrieved taxpayer to file or revise TRAN-1 and TRAN-2 to carry forward pre-GST credit.