Quick answer: In Manav Bhanot v. National Highway Authority of India (Civil Appeal arising out of SLP (C) No. 27541 of 2024), decided on 8 September 2026, a Bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran held that for land acquired under the National Highways Act, 1956, the statute under which solatium, interest and interest on solatium must be computed depends on the date the Competent Authority determines compensation under Section 3G(1) of that Act — the functional equivalent of a Section 11 award under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 — and not on the date the acquisition proceedings commenced, nor on the date of any later arbitral award on a disputed quantum. Because the Competent Authority’s determination in this case was made on 11 July 2014, before the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 was extended to National Highways Act acquisitions with effect from 1 January 2015, the appellant’s compensation had to be computed under the 1894 Act.
1. Introduction
Every kilometre of India’s expanding national highway network is built on land compulsorily acquired from private owners, and for nearly three decades that acquisition has proceeded under a special code — Sections 3A to 3J of the National Highways Act, 1956 — designed to move faster than the general law of eminent domain. That speed has come at a recurring cost in litigation: because the National Highways Act code sits alongside, and periodically borrows from, both the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 and its 2013 successor, landowners and the National Highways Authority of India (“NHAI”) have spent over a decade disputing which of the two general statutes governs the calculation of solatium and interest for any given highway acquisition. The Supreme Court has now addressed that dispute for what is likely to be a common fact pattern going forward: an acquisition begun under the older law, with a compensation determination made in the narrow window before the newer law was extended to highway acquisitions, followed by a later arbitral dispute over quantum.
The appellant, Manav Bhanot, argued that because the arbitral award resolving his compensation dispute was passed in 2017 — well after the 2013 Act had been extended to National Highways Act acquisitions — his compensation should carry the more generous solatium and interest regime of the 2013 Act. NHAI argued that the relevant date was not the arbitral award but the Competent Authority’s own initial determination of compensation, made in 2014, before the cut-off. The Supreme Court agreed with NHAI, but not before working through the statutory history of the National Highways Act’s compensation code, an earlier constitutional challenge to that code, and a Constitution Bench ruling on an analogous cut-off problem under the 2013 Act itself.
This article examines that reasoning: the facts that gave rise to the dispute, the statutory scheme spanning three Central enactments that the Court had to reconcile, and what the judgment settles — and leaves open — for landowners, NHAI, and the arbitrators and courts that adjudicate these disputes.
2. Case Summary and Background
The appellant’s land was acquired for a national highway project under the special procedure in Sections 3A to 3J of the National Highways Act, 1956 (“the NH Act”). A notification under Section 3A was published in the Official Gazette on 7 June 2011, and in one English and one Hindi newspaper on 1 July 2011. After objections were invited and considered under Section 3C, a declaration of acquisition under Section 3D(1) was published on 20 January 2012, again in the Gazette and in two newspapers. A notice under Section 3D(1) was issued to landowners on 1 September 2012 to begin the process of determining compensation.
The Competent Authority for the project — the NH-7 Sub-Divisional Officer at Jabalpur — determined the compensation payable by an order dated 11 July 2014, fixing a total award of ₹3,47,38,287 for the acquisition. The appellant received his share, ₹49,17,000, on 13 October 2014. Dissatisfied with the quantum, he invoked the reference mechanism under Section 3G(5) of the NH Act, which sends a disputed determination to an arbitrator appointed by the Central Government. The Arbitrator’s award followed on 13 January 2016 (later described in the judgment’s chronology as 17 May 2017 for the purpose of the appellant’s alternative argument). Both sides then challenged aspects of that award under Sections 34 and 37 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, and it was those proceedings that ultimately reached the Supreme Court by special leave.
By the time the matter reached the Supreme Court, the parties had narrowed the dispute to a single, isolated legal question: assuming the appellant was entitled to solatium, interest, and interest on solatium as an incident of the compulsory acquisition — a point NHAI did not contest — under which statute should those components be computed, the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 (“the 1894 Act”) or the 2013 Act? The appellant, represented by senior counsel Harin P. Raval, argued for the 2013 Act, relying on the Supreme Court’s 2025 refusal (in what the judgment calls Tarsem Singh-II) to confine its 2019 ruling in Union of India v. Tarsem Singh (“Tarsem Singh-I”) to prospective effect — a refusal grounded in the proposition that landowners whose acquisition fell on either side of 1 January 2015 could not be treated differently as to solatium and interest. In the alternative, he argued that even on NHAI’s own test, the Arbitrator’s award in this case was passed after 1 January 2015, and should itself be treated as the relevant determination. NHAI, represented by senior counsel Ankur Mittal, argued that the 2013 Act’s compensation provisions were extended to NH Act acquisitions only from 1 January 2015, relying on a more recent decision, National Highways Authority of India v. Tarsem Singh (“Tarsem Singh-III”), and that the Competent Authority’s determination here — the NH Act’s own equivalent of an award — predated that cut-off by nearly six months.
3. Legal Analysis
3.1 Three statutes, one compensation question
The dispute required the Court to reconcile provisions across three enactments. The 1894 Act, still the general law of eminent domain for enactments not covered by the 2013 Act, proceeds through a preliminary notification and survey under Section 4, an objection and hearing process under Section 5A, a declaration of public purpose under Section 6 (which must issue within three years of the Section 4 notification), an inquiry and award by the Collector under Section 11 (to be made within two years of the declaration, failing which the proceedings lapse), and, for a landowner dissatisfied with the Collector’s award, a reference to the civil court under Section 18.
The NH Act, as amended by Act 16 of 1997 to insert Sections 3A to 3J, mirrors this sequence with tighter timelines and different institutional actors, reflecting Parliament’s judgment that highway projects could not tolerate the delays of the general law. Section 3A provides for the acquisition notification; Section 3C for the hearing of objections; Section 3D for the declaration of acquisition by the Central Government, which must issue within one year of the Section 3A notification or that notification lapses; Section 3E vests the land in the Central Government and empowers the Competent Authority to take possession once the Section 3G compensation has been deposited under Section 3H; and Section 3G empowers the Competent Authority — not a Collector — to determine and pay the compensation in the first instance, with any party aggrieved by that determination entitled, under Section 3G(5), to have the dispute resolved by a Central Government-appointed arbitrator rather than by reference to a civil court. As the Court observed, this last feature is a deliberate substitution: delays inherent in references to district judges and subsequent appeals to the High Court and Supreme Court under the general law are avoided by routing disputes through arbitration under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 instead.
Notably, the original 1997 amendment went further and added Section 3J, which excluded the 1894 Act altogether from applying to NH Act acquisitions — including, crucially, its solatium and interest provisions. That exclusion was challenged and, in Tarsem Singh-I, struck down as violative of Article 14 of the Constitution: the Court there held that Parliament could speed up highway acquisitions procedurally, but could not, without an intelligible differentia, deny highway landowners the solatium and interest available to every other landowner whose property was compulsorily taken. That ruling restored solatium and interest entitlement to acquisitions carried out under the NH Act throughout the 1997-to-2015 period during which Section 3J had purported to exclude the 1894 Act.
The 2013 Act layered a third regime on top. Section 105 excludes the 2013 Act’s compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement provisions from applying to the eighteen-odd enactments listed in the Fourth Schedule — which includes the NH Act — but sub-section (3) directed the Central Government to notify, within one year of the 2013 Act’s commencement, that the more generous First, Second and Third Schedule benefits would nonetheless extend to those Fourth Schedule enactments. That sub-section was amended by Ordinance 9 of 2014 to fix 1 January 2015 as the date from which those benefits would apply to Fourth Schedule acquisitions, an amendment later extended by Ordinance 5 of 2015 and given final effect by a notification effective from 19 September 2015. The net effect, as the Bench summarised it, is that acquisitions under the NH Act sit in a three-way statutory sandwich: solatium and interest are due throughout, by force of Tarsem Singh-I; but which of the two quantification regimes — the 1894 Act’s fixed percentages or the more generous 2013 Act formula — applies to any given acquisition depends on where that acquisition falls relative to 1 January 2015.
3.2 Locating the right reference date
The harder question was not whether a cut-off date existed, but what event, within a multi-stage acquisition process that can span years, should be tested against it. The appellant’s primary submission — that Tarsem Singh-II‘s refusal to limit Tarsem Singh-I to prospective effect meant the 2013 Act should govern regardless of timing — was, in the Bench’s assessment, a misreading of what Tarsem Singh-II actually decided. That decision addressed a different mischief: it prevented NHAI from using a prospective-effect argument to deny solatium and interest altogether to landowners whose acquisitions had already concluded before 2019, the very landowners Tarsem Singh-I was meant to benefit. It did not hold, and could not be read to hold, that the 2013 Act’s more generous quantification method applies to every acquisition irrespective of when the compensation was actually determined; that would collapse the very cut-off Parliament fixed by amending Section 105(3) and would have effectively overwritten the deliberate one-year insulation period at which Section 105 aims. The Bench described the issue in Manav Bhanot as res integra for this reason: neither Tarsem Singh-I nor Tarsem Singh-II had actually decided which of the two Acts’ quantification formulas applies where an acquisition straddles the 1 January 2015 line, and Tarsem Singh-III had addressed only proceedings that had already attained finality.
To answer that question, the Bench drew directly on the Constitution Bench’s treatment of an analogous problem under the 2013 Act’s own transitional provision, Section 24(1)(a), in Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal. That provision determines whether an acquisition begun under the 1894 Act should be treated as governed by the 2013 Act, and the Constitution Bench held, at paragraph 366.1 of its judgment, that the answer turns not on when the acquisition proceedings were commenced but on whether an award under Section 11 of the 1894 Act had been made as of 1 January 2014, the 2013 Act’s commencement date: no award as of that date means the 2013 Act’s compensation provisions apply; an award made before that date means the 1894 Act continues to govern the compensation calculation even though the acquisition proceeds to completion after the changeover.
Transplanting that logic onto the NH Act, the Bench held that the operative event is the initial determination of compensation by the Competent Authority under Section 3G(1) — because that determination, not any later arbitral resolution of a quantum dispute under Section 3G(5), is the functional equivalent of a Section 11 award. The arbitral proceeding under the NH Act, the Court reasoned, is analogous to the civil court’s determination on a Section 18 reference under the 1894 Act: a mechanism for resolving disagreement with an award already made, not the award itself. On the facts, the Competent Authority’s Section 3G(1) determination was made on 11 July 2014 — after the 2013 Act’s general commencement on 1 January 2014, but nearly six months before the 1 January 2015 date from which its compensation provisions were extended to NH Act acquisitions specifically. That placed the acquisition squarely within the 1894 Act’s quantification regime for solatium, interest and interest on solatium, notwithstanding that the arbitral dispute over the correctness of that determination was not resolved until years later.
The Bench also rejected the appellant’s attempt to invoke a Ministry of Road Transport and Highways notification stating that acquisitions where the Section 3G award had not been announced by 31 December 2014, or had been announced but compensation for the majority of the affected land holdings remained unpaid as of that date, would fall under the 2013 Act’s First Schedule. On the record, NHAI had shown that compensation for 1.7 of the total 3.08 hectares acquired — a majority of the land holdings — had in fact been paid in 2014, so the notification’s own terms did not assist the appellant.
4. Practical Significance
For landowners and their counsel litigating or negotiating compensation for land taken under the National Highways Act, the judgment supplies a bright-line reference date that has, until now, been genuinely unsettled: the date of the Competent Authority’s Section 3G(1) determination, not the date the acquisition process began and not the date any subsequent arbitral or judicial proceeding concludes. Anyone assessing whether a client’s acquisition falls under the 1894 Act’s fixed-percentage solatium and interest formula or the 2013 Act’s more generous First Schedule multiplier should now look first for that determination and its date, rather than assuming that a still-pending dispute automatically imports the later, more favourable regime. Where the Section 3G(1) determination itself is delayed — whether by administrative inaction or because the acquiring authority deliberately slow-walks it — a landowner has an evident incentive to press for an early determination if it postdates 1 January 2015, and an equally evident incentive to resist any suggestion that a later, informal revision of an earlier determination should be treated as the operative one.
For NHAI and other authorities executing highway acquisitions, the judgment confirms that liability for solatium and interest, settled since Tarsem Singh-I, cannot be revisited, but it also confirms that the pre-2015 acquisitions in the pipeline — of which there remain many, given how long compensation disputes of this kind can take to litigate — will continue to be quantified under the older, less generous 1894 Act formula so long as the initial determination predates the cut-off. This should bring some predictability to the authority’s contingent liabilities for legacy acquisitions still working their way through arbitration and the courts.
For arbitrators appointed under Section 3G(5) and the courts reviewing their awards under Sections 34 and 37 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, the judgment clarifies that the choice of governing statute for solatium and interest is fixed, as a matter of law, by the date of the underlying Section 3G(1) determination that the arbitration reviews — not by when the arbitral award itself happens to issue. An award that applies the wrong regime for that reason would now appear vulnerable to challenge on that basis.
More broadly, the judgment shows that the “award date, not acquisition date” principle the Constitution Bench developed for the transition from the 1894 Act to the 2013 Act in Indore Development Authority is not confined to that transition: it is a general answer to locating the operative moment in any multi-stage acquisition straddling a change in the governing compensation regime, exported here, by analogy, to a structurally similar problem under a different statute. Practitioners handling acquisitions under other Fourth Schedule enactments — the Requisitioning and Acquisition of Immovable Property Act, 1952 among them — should expect the same reasoning to apply wherever a comparable cut-off dispute arises.
5. Conclusion
Manav Bhanot v. National Highway Authority of India resolves, in a single, comparatively short judgment, a question that had been left open by two earlier rounds of litigation over the same underlying statutory conflict. Tarsem Singh-I established that highway landowners are entitled to solatium and interest at all; Tarsem Singh-II established that this entitlement could not be denied merely because an acquisition predated 2019; but neither addressed which of the two available quantification formulas applies where an acquisition’s various stages straddle the 1 January 2015 cut-off. The present Bench has now supplied that missing rule, importing the Constitution Bench’s award-date test from Indore Development Authority and applying it to identify the Competent Authority’s Section 3G(1) determination — rather than the acquisition’s commencement or any later arbitral award — as the decisive event.
The rule is a narrow one, confined to the transition between the 1894 and 2013 Acts as it operates through the National Highways Act’s own compensation machinery, but its practical reach is considerable given how many highway acquisitions from the pre-2015 period remain in active dispute. For the profession, the judgment’s chief value lies less in its outcome for this particular appellant — whose compensation will now be recalculated under the less generous 1894 Act formula — than in the clarity it brings to a dating problem that has, until now, invited exactly the kind of alternative and fallback arguments the appellant advanced here. Counsel on both sides of future highway acquisition disputes now have a fixed point to argue from.
Citations
Primary judgment
- Manav Bhanot v. National Highway Authority of India, Civil Appeal arising out of SLP (C) No. 27541 of 2024, Supreme Court of India, 2026 INSC 973 (Reportable), decided 8 September 2026 (Coram: J.B. Pardiwala, J. and K. Vinod Chandran, J.; judgment authored by K. Vinod Chandran, J.). The civil appeal number itself is shown as blank in the retrieved text (leave having been granted on the day of decision) and is accordingly cited here by the underlying SLP number. Source: Indian Kanoon, accessed 9 September 2026.
Precedents relied on, as recorded in the judgment
- Union of India v. Tarsem Singh (“Tarsem Singh-I”), (2019) 9 SCC 304, Supreme Court of India (Coram: R.F. Nariman, J. and Surya Kant, J.; judgment authored by Nariman, J.), decided 19 September 2019, quoted from paragraphs 9 (cited in the primary judgment as paragraph 10) and 12 (cited in the primary judgment as paragraph 13) of that decision on the National Highways Act’s compensation machinery and the 2013 Act’s First and Fourth Schedules; the paragraph numbering in the primary judgment differs slightly from the numbering in the copy retrieved for this article, which is noted here rather than treated as a substantive discrepancy since the quoted text itself matches verbatim. Independently retrieved. Source: Indian Kanoon, accessed 9 September 2026.
- Union of India v. Tarsem Singh (“Tarsem Singh-II”), cited in the primary judgment as “2025 SCC OnLine SC 235”; the copy independently retrieved for this article carries the neutral citation 2025 INSC 146 (Miscellaneous Application No. 1773/2021 in Civil Appeal No. 7064/2019, with connected appeals), Supreme Court of India (Coram: Surya Kant, J. and Ujjal Bhuyan, J.; judgment authored by Surya Kant, J.), decided 4 February 2025, quoted from paragraph 19 of that decision on the equal treatment of landowners whose acquisitions fell on either side of 1 January 2015. Independently retrieved. Source: Indian Kanoon, accessed 9 September 2026.
- National Highways Authority of India v. Tarsem Singh (“Tarsem Singh-III”), cited in the primary judgment as “2026 SCC OnLine SC 481”; not independently retrieved for this article.
- Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal, (2020) 8 SCC 129, Supreme Court of India (Constitution Bench), quoted from paragraph 366.1 of that decision on the award-date test under Section 24(1)(a) of the 2013 Act; not independently retrieved for this article.
Statutory and regulatory provisions engaged
- Sections 3A to 3J of the National Highways Act, 1956 (Sections 3A to 3J inserted by Act 16 of 1997), as set out and construed in the primary judgment.
- Sections 4, 5A, 6, 11, 18, 23 and 28 of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, as set out and construed in the primary judgment.
- Sections 24, 105 and 113, and the First and Fourth Schedules, of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, as amended by Ordinance 9 of 2014 and Ordinance 5 of 2015, as set out and construed in the primary judgment.
- Sections 34 and 37 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, and Article 14 of the Constitution of India, as referred to in the primary judgment.
This article is not legal advice and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Readers should verify the certified copy of the judgment and any subsequent clarificatory orders before relying on it, and consult a qualified advocate on the facts of their matter.