MP High Court: limitation to seek enhanced land-acquisition compensation runs from knowledge of the award, not its date

Deciding a batch of connected civil revisions arising from a common land-acquisition notification for the Indore-Dahod railway line (lead matter: Civil Revision No. 997 of 2026, Sanjay v. State of Madhya Pradesh and others, with over thirty connected petitions), the Madhya Pradesh High Court at Indore held that Section 64(2)(b) of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 contains a drafting error. The provision runs limitation for a reference petition seeking enhanced compensation from "receipt of the notice from the Collector under section 21" — but Section 21 requires only a notice before the award is made, inviting claims, and has nothing to do with intimating the award itself. Comparing the 2013 Act with Section 37(2), and with the pari materia Section 12(2) of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, the Court read down the reference to "Section 21" as "Section 37(2)".

It followed the Supreme Court's rulings in Bhagwan Das v. State of U.P. and Parsottambhai Maganbhai Patel v. State of Gujarat that limitation runs from actual or constructive knowledge of the award's essential contents where no such notice is served. The Court also held that a Reference Court cannot dismiss a reference as time-barred at a preliminary stage without deciding it on merits, and that a civil revision under Section 115 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 lies against such a dismissal. It set aside the Reference Courts' orders and remanded all the matters for decision on merits.