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With Central Bill on anvil, Haryana stays land acquisition
Yoginder Gupta
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 22
Haryana has stayed all land acquisition proceedings in view of the likely introduction of a Land Acquisition Bill in the forthcoming session of Parliament. Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who issued these orders today, however said the process to acquire land would be stayed only in cases in which notifications under Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act had been issued in the past six months; to be precise on or after February 1, 2011.

In these cases, the next step, which is notification under Section 6 of the Act, would be issued after seeing the outcome of the Central legislation.

The notification under Section 6 has to be issued within one year of the notification issued under Section 4. Otherwise, the Section 4 notification lapses and the land in question stands free from acquisition proceedings. Therefore, the wait for a couple of months will not affect the land acquisition process.

Even if the Central Bill takes time to become the law of the land, Hooda can always fine tune the state’s land acquisition policy, which has already been hailed at the national level, keeping in view the provisions of the proposed Central law.

Several prominent leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, have described Haryana’s land acquisition policy as the best in the country.

Today’s orders are, however, not applicable on land to be acquired for essential infrastructure projects like roads, sewerage, canals, water channels, drainage system and power projects.

The state government is likely to issue the notification under Section 6 for land to be acquired for the Fatehabad nuclear plant within the next few days.

In view of the exemptions to the Chief Minister’s order, the Fatehabad project would not be affected.

Hooda has asked the Financial Commissioner and Principal Secretary, Revenue, to issue necessary instructions accordingly to all concerned.