I. Introduction
In India, all big infrastructure projects, a highway, a dam, or an industrial corridor, start the same way: with land. And, for more than 10 years, the law has been that before the state can take that land, it must first know the cost to the people who reside on it. The Social Impact Assessment (SIA) as per Section 4 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (RFCTLARR Act) promises this. On paper, it’s one of the more progressive ideas in Indian land law. In practice, it has too often become exactly paper.
II. Why the SIA Was Introduced
It’s important to reflect on what SIA replaced in order to grasp why it is important. The doctrine of eminent domain, which was exercised with little or no formalities, was the basis of the state’s right to acquire private land under the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act, 1894. No provision was made for the assessment of those to be displaced, no consultation, no rehabilitation package of compensation was required and when compensation was paid, it was often based on old valuations and paid late or not at all. Land was acquired using the vague phrase “public purpose” and this was widely interpreted to allow public land to be diverted to private commercial uses. Adding to all this was the notoriously bad system of land records in India, where a plot of land could have more than one claimant, who could be overlapping, and this could lead to long drawn-out disputes even if the compensation was proper. An example of this situation would be the case of Singapogu Babu Rao & Ors. v. Special Deputy Collector (Land Acquisition) & Ors. Over decades, the outcome was always the same: huge public projects with big capital costs, which were stopped in the middle by public reaction, protests, and litigation, just because there was no time to consider, before the bulldozers came, who would pay the human cost.
The RFCTLARR Act, 2013 is designed to address this. It put an end to unilateral eminent domain and replaced it with a more “humane, participative, informed and open” acquisition process. Compensation was to be calculated at market values, rehabilitation and resettlement (‘R&R’) became statutory requirements instead of discretionary gestures and most important in this discussion, a Social Impact Assessment was introduced as a mandatory requirement prior to notification of acquisition.
III. What Section 4 Requires
Section 4 of the Act is specific and detailed as it can be said to be. The necessary government must first conduct an SIA study that examines, among other things: whether the acquisition is truly for a public purpose; how many families will be affected or displaced; the amount of land (public and private) that will be affected; whether an alternate site was considered and was not feasible; and the social costs of the project versus its benefits. The process has to be participative, it is required that a public hearing be held, it must be properly advertised, it must have representation from the Panchayat or Municipal body, the SIA report must be evaluated by an independent expert body before an acquisition notification is issued. This puts the onus squarely on the state, from “the state may take land” to “the state must prove its work.”
IV. Dilution at the Centre and the States
The act was also not a guaranteed design at the Union level. The Central Government itself wanted to water down the Act within a year of its coming into force: the proposed Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Ordinance, 2014 exempted five categories of projects from the mandatory SIA and consent requirements such as industrial corridors, PPP and infrastructure, and social infrastructure projects. The Ordinance was re-promulgated on three occasions but never passed due to parliamentary opposition and lapsed in 2015. It’s very easy to overlook the importance of this one. The same Union government that had passed Section 4 as a protection, attempted to make big exceptions in the same protection in the following 12 months. The failure of the Bill to pass at the Centre did not end the issue, however. It merely transferred the same battle to the states, where several of them passed ordinary state amendments to enact the same legislation which failed to pass at the Centre.
Land is a subject on which states could legislate concurrently and so several states enacted their own exemptions in the SIA requirement, essentially doing the same thing at the state level as the former Amendment Bill 2015 had failed to do at the central level. The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) reviewed the responses to RTI applications and noticed that several states have framed amendments that have lifted the obligation to conduct a SIA for defence projects and even for some industrial or infrastructure projects and in some cases allowed for private negotiation instead of consultation with Gram Sabha. Interestingly, Andhra Pradesh conducted SIAs and asked for people’s consent only until mid-2018, after which a state amendment removed that requirement for a defined set of project categories. This is a real concern, and a writ petition by activists such as Medha Patkar took the Supreme Court’s attention in December 2018 as they pointed out that excluding entire categories of projects from SIA was in violation of Article 21 of the Constitution.
V. The Implementation Gap
Independent academic evaluation has revealed significant variance and, in some instances, real deficiency in the quality of SIA reports that have actually been prepared. A review of a sample of SIA reports from various sectors revealed that the quality of some reports was “indifferent” and indicated that agencies that produced these reports had a capacity deficiency and many of the reports were not disclosed to the public. In the same literature, there are specific failures on the ground: public hearings were called with only a few days’ notice instead of the three weeks outlined in the law, and in cases of “consent” which was actually agreed with a show of hands in place of written consent, which is a requirement of law. The most recent discovery was from Parliament itself. In its December 2025 report reviewing the Act’s implementation over more than a decade, the Standing Committee on Rural Development and Panchayati Raj pointed out the intentional misuse of the definition of land, with greenfield land being classified as brownfield, and rural land being reclassified as urban, to minimise the amount of compensation required, a practice observed in the case of big programmes like the Bharatmala highway project. The Committee’s more general conclusions provide a fuller picture of the same issues: Gram Sabha consent was received as “a mere formality”, compliance certificates were provided “mechanically”, without any real community engagement and most importantly, a recommendation that the findings of the Gram Sabha should be binding on the acquiring authority, which represents an implicit recognition that it is not as it stands under the current law.
The Act established a National Monitoring Committee (‘NMC’) that is responsible for monitoring the implementation of R&R. The 2025 Standing Committee report found that the NMC has been unable to resolve grievances in some of the country’s largest ongoing infrastructure projects, including the Ken-Betwa river-linking project and the Polavaram Irrigation Project, in both cases because social and environmental impact assessments were conducted in a fragmented, siloed way that understated cumulative livelihood impacts.
VI. Courts: Conditions, Not Stoppages
However, even if the courts have sided with these complaints, there is a consistent judicial reluctance to stop a large public project altogether once construction is underway. The earlier legal regime, as reflected in the case of Narmada Bachao Andolan v Union of India, has been the template for the Supreme Court: it gave permission for the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam to continue, even though there were definite gaps in environmental assessment and rehabilitation, it was determined that benefits outweighed disruption, and steps towards rehabilitation were to follow “side by side” with further construction. The same instinct— monitor and let the project continue rather than halt it— recurs in the Polavaram litigation: the National Green Tribunal imposed a combined penalty of ₹243 crore across four associated irrigation schemes on the Godavari for environmental non-compliance, yet did not order any of the underlying works to stop. When the National Green Tribunal took a firmer line elsewhere, setting aside the environmental clearance for the Avulapalli Balancing Reservoir project and imposing a ₹100 crore penalty, the Supreme Court stayed that very order on appeal, reasoning that halting a drinking-water project mid-construction would put the affected population “at an extremely disadvantageous position.” A comparable pattern surfaces in the Teesta-IV hydroelectric project in Sikkim, where the SIA report itself acknowledged that a number of affected landowners could not be reached or declined to participate in the public hearing, a gap that has been challenged before the National Green Tribunal and the Sikkim High Court, without the project being stopped in the interim. Taken together, these cases suggest an unstated judicial presumption in Indian project litigation: procedural or assessment failures are treated as grounds for conditions, penalties, and continued monitoring, rarely as grounds to halt a large public project once it is underway.
VII. Why This Matters for Projects
All of this could be interpreted as an issue of paperwork or indifference of the bureaucracy. A flawed or shallow SIA is not only an injustice to the displaced families; from a project perspective, judged by capital deployment, timelines, and risk allocation, it is also a real legal and commercial hazard. An SIA conducted as a formality, later shown to have misrepresented the number of affected families or ignored a community’s documented objection, gives litigants— and there is rarely a shortage of them— as the Polavaram and Teesta cases show, a genuine procedural hook for injunctions, stays, and years of delay, even if courts are ultimately reluctant to order a full stoppage. Capital gets committed, construction begins, and the project runs into years of monitoring, penalties and litigation precisely because the step meant to prevent exactly this outcome was treated as a formality rather than a safeguard. In other words, the very corner-cutting that saves time at the acquisition stage tends to cost far more time later, in litigation, negotiation, and idle capital.
VIII. Conclusion
In some ways, the Standing Committee’s report in December 2025 could be interpreted as an admission that a decade of RFCTLARR has not filled this gap. Its recommendations, binding SIA findings, a central mechanism to monitor the misclassification of the land, integrated rather than siloed social and environmental assessment and a stronger and empowered NMC are essentially attempts to turn what is now a procedural courtesy into a substantive check. Whether that means amendment, and whether states will keep going around it in the interim, will be interesting to watch especially since the Union government’s own attempt to formally dilute Section 4 in 2014-15 has proved that the desire to exempt infrastructure projects from these protections is not gone; it’s just been moved to the state legislatures. What is clear is that the core lesson of the pre-2013 era, that skipping the hard work of understanding who a project displaces eventually costs more than doing that work properly, has not yet been fully understood. Until compliance with Section 4 is treated as a substantive obligation rather than a box to tick before the file moves forward, India’s infrastructure ambitions will keep running into the same friction they were meant to have left behind.
Tanish Agarwal is a law student at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University.
