Farmers in distress, allow them to survive, SC tells Karnataka

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday reprimanded Karnataka govt for challenging a high court decision to enhance the rate compensation for acquisition of farmers' lands, dismissed its appeal and said the state, where thousands of farmers die by suicide annually, must allow the distressed community to survive.

The case related to the acquisition of lands of farmers in October 2005 for construction of Hipparagi major irrigation project on Krishna River. The Special Land Acquisition Officer determined the compensation at the rate of Rs 59,000 per acre of irrigated land and Rs 24,557 per acre of dry land.

The reference court enhanced it to Rs 1,70,00 per acre in Aug 2009. When the appeal against the determination was pending before the Karnataka HC, the irrigation department decided to settle the pending cases by awarding compensation at the rate of Rs 3,69,000 per acre for acquisition of land in the year 2004-05, with 5% escalation for subsequent year acquisitions.

But the HC enhanced it to Rs 5 lakh per acre in March 2021 and in December 2022, and later extended the enhanced rate of compensation to other farmers whose lands were acquired saying they all fall in the same category of persons whose lands were acquired for the Hipparagi project.

Finding that the state was ready to argue despite the SC expressing its disinclination to entertain the appeal, a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan said, "You (the state) acquire their lands but are not ready to pay them a fair compensation. The farmers are a distressed lot."

"If you do not want to pay the enhanced compensation, why don't you return the lands to them in exercise of your eminent domain powers," the bench said before dismissing the state's appeal.

The SC's observation that the farmers in the state are a distressed lot is borne out from the state revenue department's statistics, which recently said that between April 1, 2023, and August 4, 2024, as many as 1,216 farmers have died by suicide.

Statistics also reveal that between 2013 and 2022 as many as 8,245 farmers have died by suicide, worst hit districts being Belagavi, Haveri, Dharwad, Chikkamagaluru and Kalaburgi. The reasons behind the farmers distress are drought, crop damage and the menace of debt. The state had argued before the SC that the HC erred in condoning a delay of 11 years in filing of the petition seeking parity and entitlement to enhanced compensation, without the petitioners showing sufficient cause for delay in approaching the HC.

The state had also said that the petitioners before HC had already received enhanced compensation as decided by the reference court and could not be entitled to the rate of compensation which was fixed after passage of almost a decade.

"Judgments of this nature (from the HC) would entitle parties a right to approach the court at any point of time to seek enhanced compensation. Such an exercise would set at naught the principle that there must be quietus to litigation," the state had said arguing that such entitlement to enhanced compensation would cast a huge financial liability on the project proponent.


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