The Supreme Court has agreed to hear in open court a review petition filed by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) challenging its February 2025 verdict that made retrospective the grant of compensation and interest to farmers whose lands were acquired under the National Highways Act.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan issued notice on the NHAI’s review plea and scheduled it for open-court hearing on November 11, 2025, at 3 PM.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for NHAI, informed the court that the issue has financial implications of around ₹32,000 crore, far exceeding the ₹100 crore estimated earlier.
On February 4, 2025, the apex court had dismissed NHAI’s plea seeking to make the benefit of its 2019 ruling in Union of India v. Tarsem Singh operate prospectively, instead holding that it would apply retrospectively to all acquisitions made between 1997 and 2015 under the NHAI Act.
In that 2019 judgment, the top court had declared Section 3J of the NHAI Act—which excluded the application of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 and denied landowners solatium and interest—to be violative of Article 14 of the Constitution.
Reaffirming those principles in February, the bench had said:
“We find no merit in the contentions raised by the applicant, NHAI. We reaffirm the principles established in Tarsem Singh regarding the beneficial nature of granting solatium and interest while emphasising the need to avoid creating unjust classifications lacking intelligible differentia.”
The court rejected the plea to restrict the ruling’s operation prospectively, reasoning that doing so would “nullify the very relief that Tarsem Singh intended to provide” and would recreate unequal treatment among landowners.
The February ruling also clarified that the benefit of solatium and interest would extend only to aggrieved landowners whose lands were acquired between 1997 and 2015 and would not entail reopening of concluded cases.
With the court now agreeing to an open-court hearing, the outcome of the review plea could have significant fiscal consequences for the government and shape the compensation framework for past highway acquisitions across the country.
