By Léna Chiaravalli
In India, the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 gives the right for Government authorities to acquire parcels of land for the implementation of development projects.. In the context of a rapid growth of cities, the process of urbanisation shall accompany the needs of increasing populations. Thus, the Government tends to make use of his eminent domain power –the right to acquire land for a public purpose- very regularly. However, in practice, this process can imply the displacement of the affected landowners, whom are sometimes forced to give away their property in exchange of compensations. These events contributed to feed people’s bitterness for this practice, and the proposed Reforms of the Land Acquisition Act got stalled. Moreover, land acquisition can be extremely costly, and this can compromise the well implementation of related development projects.
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