Land Acquisition Tackling obstacles with transparency

A total of 697 highway projects in the country are delayed as of July 2024 and 35% of all project delays are resulting from protracted disputes due to inaccuracies in land records, resistance from local stakeholders and prolonged compensation negotiations. Land acquisition has become a key obstacle to be overcome in the march towards the development of India’s road infrastructure. The report tabled by MoRTH on Demand for Grants (2025-26) in the parliamentary panel in the Upper House in March this year said Maharashtra accounted for the highest number of these projects, followed by Karnataka and Haryana.

Other factors included delays in obtaining railway clearances for road overbridges (ROBs) and underpasses, financial constraints faced by contractors, and regulatory approvals.

Land Acquisition begins once the alignment plan and land acquisition plan for a specific project are approved. The process starts with the appointment of a revenue functionary of the State Government as Competent Authority for Land Acquisition (CALA) for each NH Project and ends at taking of physical possession of the land by the implementing authority and disbursal of compensation to each affected party.  

The entire land acquisition process involved drafting and publication of multiple notifications, each of which would pass through several authorities for approval before its final publication. The processing of these notifications manually was time-consuming and prone to errors. Further, the funds out of which compensation was to be paid for land acquired under the National Highways Act 1956 were placed solely at the disposal of CALA and disbursed after declaration and finalization of land acquisition awards.

In order to remove bottlenecks such as delays due to mismatch or errors in entries and non-transparency in the determination and disbursal of compensation, MoRTH developed a workflow-based automation of the present land acquisition process for NH projects. The online Land Acquisition (LA) system would provide linkage across authorities, eliminate the need of physical copy, reduce formatting errors, clerical mistakes and enable easy tracking of the draft notification.

The process involved several stakeholders including State PWDs that prepare the DPRs on the basis of which the land is acquired and state revenue officials who carry out the actual land acquisition and Project zones of the Ministry. Extensive consultations were held with all stakeholders resulting in the design of the portal Bhoomi Rashi, which supported entries in both Hindi and English for easy usability. Training/orientation sessions were organized over a period of six months in each state with officers who would actually be using the portal for submitting draft notifications.

Bhoomi Rashi is integrated with the Public Financial Management System (PFMS) platform of the Ministry of Finance for deposition of compensation in the account of affected persons on real-time basis. This integration has resulted in avoiding the parking of huge public funds in the account of CALA. With the operation of this portal, the land acquisition process has been expedited significantly, become error-free and more transparent and notifications at every stage are being processed on a real time basis.