Landowners are standing with ‘begging bowls’ to recover ₹1,557.61 crore, laments Madras High Court-OxBig News Network

Some steps must be taken to ensure that the compensation amounts are paid, says judge.

The Madras High Court has found that hundreds of land owners whose properties had been acquired for various purposes in the 38 districts of Tamil Nadu as well as in Puducherry were yet to be paid an astounding amount of ₹1,557.61 crore as on December 31, 2024.

Justice N. Anand Venkatesh called for the statistics from the High Court’s Registrar (Statistics) and found that 1,222 execution petitions (EPs) were pending in Tamil Nadu for recovery of ₹1,521.83 crore and 59 EPs were pending in Puducherry for recovering ₹35.78 crore.

“The amount that has been ascertained by the Registry is alarming and hence some steps must be taken to ensure that the compensation amounts are paid,” the judge observed and sought the assistance of Advocate General P.S. Raman in finding a solution to the problem.

The judge passed the interim orders on a 2017 writ petition filed jointly by M. Settu and M. Chandrasekar seeking compensation for the lands acquired from them for establishing Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) factory in Ranipet district (formerly a part of Vellore district).

While perusing the case bundle, Justice Venkatesh found that Justice N. Seshasayee (since retired) had, in March 2018, called for details of the number of execution petitions pending in various courts across Tamil Nadu in land acquisition cases and found that a staggering amount of ₹760 crore had to be recovered.

Since nothing much had transpired in the matter since then, Justice Venkatesh called for fresh statistics as on December 31, 2024 and found the amount to have increased to ₹1,521.83 crore which included ₹431.12 crore in Tiruvallur district, ₹387.10 crore in Chennai, ₹375.40 crore in Namakkal and ₹319.13 crore in Chengalpattu.

“This assumes significance since the lands of the owners have been taken away and they are made to stand with the begging bowl to recover the compensation by filing execution petitions,” the judge said and observed that every property owner had a fundamental right to receive fair compensation.

Since the Chief Secretary as well as the Revenue, Industries, Highways, Housing, Finance and Adi Dravidar Welfare secretaries had been impleaded suo motu as respondents to the present writ petition in 2018 itself, the judge decided to pass further orders in the case on March 21 after hearing all of them.