Andhra Pradesh High Court holds that the right to property does not shrink with the size of the land acquired

27 October 2026

A Division Bench of Justice Ravi Nath Tilhari and Justice Purushottam Kumar Chintalapudi of the Andhra Pradesh High Court held that the right to property under Article 300-A does not depend on how much land is involved, and that even a small deprivation must follow both the authority of law and the procedure the law prescribes, even where the acquisition serves a larger public interest. The appeals arose from land at Penumaka village acquired for the E-3 Seed Access Road in the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region. The landowners argued that there was no administrative sanction, no prior survey and no revision of market value, and that objections were rejected without reasons; the State said most of the land had already come through a Land Pooling Scheme. The Court referred to Sections 11, 12, 19(1), 21 and 26 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. In one appeal interim protection against dispossession continued; in the other the Court declined to interfere, leaving the issues to the pending writ petitions.