Quick answer: In New Okhla Industrial Development Authority v. Rajveer Singh, decided on 21 September 2026, the Supreme Court held that a landowner’s application under Section 28A of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 for redetermination of compensation must be filed within three months of the award that first grants an enhancement over the Collector’s award, and that a later appellate order which merely follows or repeats that earlier enhancement — without itself deciding anything fresh — does not restart the limitation clock. Reconciling a line of decisions that had appeared to pull in different directions, the Court set aside a High Court order that had allowed a Section 28A claim filed within three months of a 2022 appellate order, holding that the claim had in truth become time-barred back in 2019, when an earlier appeal covering the same village and the same acquisition notification was first decided.
1. Introduction
Land acquired under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 has a way of generating litigation that outlives the transaction by decades, and few provisions of that Act have generated as much recurring dispute as Section 28A — the mechanism that lets a landowner who did not seek a reference to the civil court under Section 18 nonetheless claim the same enhanced compensation that a neighbour, acquired under the identical notification, later won by litigating. The provision was inserted by amendment in 1984 precisely to prevent landowners in the same acquisition from ending up with wildly different compensation depending only on who happened to litigate and who did not. But because it operates as an exception to the ordinary requirement of seeking a reference, and because it carries its own tight three-month limitation period, courts have spent forty years working out exactly when that clock starts and stops.
New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA) v. Rajveer Singh arose from a 1977 acquisition award, a reference that some landowners sought and others did not, and a chain of appeals stretching from 1981 to 2022. The party respondents, whose predecessors had accepted the original award without seeking a reference, filed a Section 28A application within three months of an appellate order passed in 2022 — an order that simply followed an earlier appellate enhancement from 2019 covering land in the same village under the same notification. The Allahabad High Court accepted the claim as timely, relying on two lines of Supreme Court authority that read Section 28A generously. NOIDA, as the requisitioning authority, appealed.
The Supreme Court’s judgment does not overrule any of the precedents it examines. Instead, it undertakes a close, case-by-case reconciliation of six prior decisions — three of them from three-judge benches — to extract a coherent rule about which award actually starts the three-month clock. This article sets out the facts, traces that reconciliation, and considers what it settles and what it leaves open for landowners, requisitioning authorities and land acquisition litigators still working through pre-2014 acquisitions under the 1894 Act.
2. Case Summary and Background
The dispute traced back to land acquired under a notification issued under Section 4(1), read with the urgency provision in Section 17, of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. The Land Acquisition Collector’s award was passed on 15 February 1977, and the predecessors-in-interest of the party respondents received the full compensation determined by that award without seeking a reference under Section 18. Other landowners whose land fell under the same notification did seek a reference, but the Reference Court — the Additional District Judge, Ghaziabad — rejected it by judgment and decree dated 25 November 1981, without granting any enhancement at all.
An appeal against that rejection, First Appeal No. 458 of 1982, remained pending for decades and was eventually disposed of on 18 April 2022. Crucially, the High Court’s 2022 order in that appeal did not independently examine the compensation question; it simply followed the reasoning and outcome of an earlier, separate appeal — First Appeal No. 593 of 1982 — which the High Court had already decided on 8 July 2019, granting an enhancement to landowners whose land lay in the same village and under the same notification as the party respondents’ land.
Acting on the strength of the 2022 order, the party respondents filed their Section 28A application before the Collector on 23 May 2022 — within three months of that order. When the application went unaddressed, they secured a writ direction for expeditious disposal, but the Collector then rejected the application as not maintainable, on the ground that it was founded on an appellate order rather than on an award of the Reference Court itself. The landowners challenged that rejection before the Allahabad High Court, which set it aside. The High Court held that the three-judge Bench decision in Union of India v. Pradeep Kumari, (1995) 2 SCC 736, governed the case, and that this had been reaffirmed by Banwari v. Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd., 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3685, which — on facts the High Court treated as identical — had permitted a Section 28A claim filed within three months of a High Court order enhancing compensation in first appeal.
NOIDA, as the requisitioning authority aggrieved by the direction to entertain and allow the Section 28A application, appealed to the Supreme Court by special leave. The appeal was heard by a bench of J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran, JJ., which delivered a reportable judgment on 21 September 2026, allowing the appeal, setting aside the High Court’s order, and rejecting the Section 28A application as barred by limitation.
3. Legal Analysis
3.1 The statutory architecture of Section 28A
Section 28A(1) of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 allows a person interested in land covered by a Section 4(1) notification, who did not himself seek a reference under Section 18, to apply to the Collector for redetermination of his compensation where an award made by a court under Part III of the Act — that is, on a reference — grants an amount in excess of what the Collector awarded under Section 11, provided the application is made within three months of the date of that award. Sub-section (2) empowers the Collector to redetermine compensation accordingly, and sub-section (3) then gives the applicant a further right to seek a reference if dissatisfied with the Collector’s redetermination under sub-section (2). The Court’s judgment stresses that this internal structure matters: sub-section (3)’s reference mechanism presupposes an award made by the Collector under sub-section (2), and cannot sensibly apply where the “excess” being relied on was itself granted by a High Court in appeal rather than by the Collector on redetermination — a structural point the Court used to explain why an application founded directly on an appellate enhancement sits somewhat uneasily within the section’s own machinery, even where such a claim is otherwise permitted.
3.2 Reading Pradeep Kumari correctly: successive awards, not successive appeals
The High Court’s reliance on Pradeep Kumari rested on that three-judge Bench’s holding that Section 28A is not confined to the very first award passed by a Reference Court after the 1984 amendment came into force; a landowner may invoke the benefit of any later award, on a reference under the same notification, that grants a higher enhancement than an earlier one. The Supreme Court in the present case accepted that proposition without qualification, but insisted on reading it in its actual factual setting: Pradeep Kumari dealt with successive awards of Reference Courts — not successive orders of an appellate court — and addressed a specific mischief, namely those in one village being unaware of a reference sought by owners in another village under the same notification, and later awards in different references producing different compensation for identically situated land. Read that way, Pradeep Kumari answers the question of which Reference Court award starts the clock when there is more than one; it does not hold that every subsequent appellate order, however derivative, generates a fresh three-month window.
The Court also traced how Pradeep Kumari’s reach was tested and confined in later decisions. In Jose Antonio Cruz v. Land Acquisition Collector, (1996) 6 SCC 746, a second three-judge Bench, considering a reference doubting Pradeep Kumari, held that “the amount awarded by the Court” in Section 28A refers only to an award made on a reference under Section 18, not to an order passed by the High Court in an appeal under Section 54 — so that limitation runs from the Reference Court’s order, not from the appeal against it. A Constitution Bench in Union of India v. Hansoli Devi, (2002) 7 SCC 273, later noted that Jose Antonio Cruz had implicitly doubted Pradeep Kumari’s reasoning on successive awards, but declined to resolve the tension because the question did not arise on the facts before it — leaving Pradeep Kumari’s ratio formally intact, but its scope narrowed by these subsequent readings. A further two-judge Bench in Union of India v. Hansoli Devi, (2010) 15 SCC 483 (a differently reported decision bearing the same case name), reaffirmed that the three-month period runs from the Reference Court’s award and not from an appellate order disposing of a challenge to it. Popat Bahiru Govardhane v. Special Land Acquisition Officer, (2013) 10 SCC 765, added a further gloss relevant to this case: limitation under Section 28A runs from the date of the award itself, not from the date the applicant came to know of it, however harshly that operates.
3.3 Distinguishing Banwari: an enhancement is not the same as a rejection followed by an enhancement
The harder precedent for the Court to work around was Banwari, a Division Bench decision on facts the High Court below had treated as identical to the present case: there, a reference had been rejected outright, an appeal against that rejection resulted in the High Court enhancing compensation for the first time, and a landowner who had never sought a reference was allowed to invoke Section 28A within three months of that appellate enhancement. Rather than treat Banwari as in conflict with Jose Antonio Cruz and Hansoli Devi, the Supreme Court read it as carving out a narrow and coherent exception: where a reference is rejected in toto, with no enhancement of any kind, no cause of action under Section 28A arises at that stage at all, because there is nothing yet to redetermine compensation “in excess of.” On that reading, the first enhancement — wherever it occurs in the appellate hierarchy — is what triggers Section 28A, and Banwari is consistent with, rather than a departure from, the rule that limitation runs from the award or order that first grants an excess.
Applying that logic to the facts before it, the Court found the party respondents’ case did not fit the Banwari exception at all. The Reference Court had indeed rejected the reference without any enhancement in 1981 — so far, the facts matched Banwari. But the first enhancement in this chain came not from the 2022 order the party respondents relied on, but from the earlier, separate appeal decided on 8 July 2019, which concerned land in the very same village under the very same notification. The 2022 order the party respondents actually invoked did no independent adjudicating; it simply applied the 2019 order’s outcome to their claim. Limitation, the Court held, had therefore begun running from 8 July 2019 and expired three months later, on 7 October 2019 — years before the party respondents filed their Section 28A application in May 2022. A later order that merely follows an earlier one, without granting any enhancement of its own, cannot generate a second limitation period.
3.4 Rejecting the “successive appeals, successive causes of action” and merger arguments
Counsel for the party respondents pressed two further arguments, both rejected. First, that if Pradeep Kumari allows successive Reference Court awards to generate successive Section 28A entitlements, successive appellate orders should do the same. The Court declined to extend the analogy, pointing out that a High Court sitting in first appeal, as a court of record, is ordinarily bound by an earlier coordinate Bench decision on the same acquisition; a later appeal that simply follows that earlier ruling adds no new determination capable of restarting limitation, and treating it otherwise would let parties manufacture fresh limitation windows indefinitely by filing sequential, largely repetitive appeals. Second, the party respondents relied on Andanayya v. Deputy Chief Engineer, 2026 SCC OnLine SC 482, a two-judge Bench decision that had accepted, applying a doctrine of merger, that even a second Section 28A application could be maintained once a High Court’s appellate order enhanced compensation further. The Court declined to follow Andanayya, holding it inconsistent with the settled position — including sub-section (vi) of the Pradeep Kumari conditions, that only one application under Section 28A is permissible per applicant — and with the structural reading of sub-sections (1) to (3) discussed above. Where a Section 28A application is pending and an appeal against the underlying Reference Court award is also pending, the Court noted, the correct procedure, as recognised in Bharatsing v. State of Maharashtra, (2018) 11 SCC 92, is for the Collector to keep the Section 28A application pending until the appeal is decided, so any further enhancement on appeal is captured within the same, single application — not to treat each appellate order as licensing a fresh one.
4. Practical Significance
For land acquisition practitioners still handling pre-2014 acquisitions under the 1894 Act — a category that, as this case shows, can remain live in the courts for over forty years — the judgment supplies a workable, fact-sensitive test rather than a bright-line rule tied to any single stage of the appellate hierarchy: identify the earliest award or order, at any level, that first grants an amount in excess of the Collector’s Section 11 award, and treat that as the trigger for the three-month clock. Every subsequent order in the same chain that merely follows or restates that first enhancement, without independently redetermining compensation, is legally inert for limitation purposes. Advocates advising landowners who did not seek a reference should therefore monitor every reference and appeal proceeding in the same acquisition, not just the appeal nominally connected to their own village or plot, since a first enhancement anywhere within the same notification can start their own limitation running even before any order concerning their specific land is passed.
For requisitioning authorities and government departments defending Section 28A claims, the decision gives a clear basis to resist applications filed after a chain of successive but substantively repetitive appellate orders, by tracing the litigation history back to the order that actually first granted an enhancement. Authorities should be prepared to demonstrate, as NOIDA did here, that a later order relied on by the applicant added nothing to an earlier one already covering the same village and notification — a fact-intensive exercise that will often require assembling the full appellate history of a decades-old acquisition.
For Collectors administering Section 28A applications, the judgment reinforces the practice endorsed in Bharatsing: where an appeal against a Reference Court award is pending, a Section 28A application founded on that award should be kept pending rather than decided on the earlier, potentially superseded figure, so that any further enhancement on appeal is folded into a single, timely application rather than generating disputes about successive filings. Conversely, the ruling forecloses the argument, drawn from Andanayya, that a landowner can file a second Section 28A application to chase a later, higher appellate figure once an earlier application has already been made and decided.
Finally, though the 1894 Act has been substantially replaced by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 for acquisitions after 1 January 2014, disputes of exactly this vintage — awards from the 1970s still generating appeals in 2022 — remain a real and recurring feature of Indian land acquisition litigation, particularly around large urban development authorities such as NOIDA that acquired extensive tracts decades ago. The judgment’s careful reconciliation of six precedents, several from benches of three or five judges, gives lower courts and Collectors a structured method for resolving the many pending Section 28A disputes still working their way through this older statutory regime.
5. Conclusion
NOIDA v. Rajveer Singh does not announce a new rule so much as it disciplines the application of several existing ones that had come to be read, at least by the High Court below, as pointing toward an increasingly generous limitation position for Section 28A claimants. By insisting that the three-month clock runs from the award or order that first grants an enhancement — and not from any later order that simply follows it — the Supreme Court preserved both the beneficial purpose Section 28A was enacted to serve, ensuring parity among landowners acquired under a single notification, and the discipline that a strict limitation period is meant to impose. For a statute that continues to generate litigation over acquisitions half a century old, the judgment offers a reasonably clear, if fact-intensive, method for locating exactly which order in a long appellate chain starts, and ends, the window for claiming that parity.
Citations
Primary judgment
- New Okhla Industrial Development Authority & Anr. v. Rajveer Singh & Ors., Civil Appeal (arising out of SLP(C) No. 18801 of 2025), Supreme Court of India (J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran, JJ.), decided 21 September 2026; Reportable. The appeal number was not populated in the version retrieved. Source: Indian Kanoon, accessed 22 September 2026.
Cases cited in the judgment
- Union of India and Another v. Pradeep Kumari and Others, (1995) 2 SCC 736 (three-judge Bench; Section 28A available on any of successive Reference Court awards under the same notification, not confined to the first).
- Jose Antonio Cruz Dos R. Rodriguese and Another v. Land Acquisition Collector and Another, (1996) 6 SCC 746 (three-judge Bench; “award of the Court” under Section 28A means an award on a reference under Section 18, not an appellate order under Section 54).
- Union of India and Another v. Hansoli Devi and Others, (2002) 7 SCC 273 (Constitution Bench; dismissal of a reference on any ground, including delay, still attracts Section 28A; receipt of compensation without protest does not disentitle a claimant).
- Union of India and Another v. Hansoli Devi and Others, (2010) 15 SCC 483 (two-judge Bench; limitation runs from the Reference Court’s award, not from an appellate order).
- Popat Bahiru Govardhane and Others v. Special Land Acquisition Officer and Another, (2013) 10 SCC 765 (limitation under Section 28A runs from the date of the award, not the date of knowledge).
- Bharatsing s/o Gulabsingh Jakhad and Others v. State of Maharashtra and Others, (2018) 11 SCC 92 (a Section 28A application should be kept in abeyance pending an appeal against the underlying Reference Court award).
- Banwari and Others v. Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (HSIIDC) and Another, 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3685 (Section 28A available within three months of a High Court’s first enhancement in appeal, where the underlying reference was rejected without any enhancement).
- Andanayya and Ors. v. Deputy Chief Engineer and Ors., 2026 SCC OnLine SC 482 (two-judge Bench view, not followed in the present judgment, that a second Section 28A application may be maintained after a further appellate enhancement, applying the doctrine of merger).
- Babua Ram and Ors. v. State of U.P. and Anr., (1995) 2 SCC 689, referred to in the discussion of Andanayya and distinguished.
This article relies solely on the description of the cited decisions as they appear in the primary judgment; none of the cited cases was independently retrieved for this article.
Statutory provisions engaged
- Sections 4(1), 11, 17, 18, 26, 28A and 54, Land Acquisition Act, 1894 (notification for acquisition; Collector’s award; urgency acquisition; reference to court; Reference Court’s award; redetermination of compensation for non-referring landowners; first appeal).
- Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 — noted as the successor statute for acquisitions after 1 January 2014; not applicable to, and not cited in, the primary judgment, which concerns a 1977 award under the 1894 Act.
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.