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The Land Acquisition Bill needs to be understood in two contexts- the economic aspect and the political aspect- and I am doing this because you cannot separate politics from economics. Saiprasad Bejgam has provided a great analysis from the macro-economic point of view and should be read before mine. I am focusing on the micro-economic aspect as it is through this angle which the Opposition is attacking the Bill. I am also not focusing on the land-hoarding issue which some other answers have dealt with sufficiently.To give a brief summary of the Land Acquisition Act of 2013 brought by the UPA, there were following key provisions:- Land-owners whose land would be acquired by industry would be compensated 4X the market value of the land if it is in a rural area and 2X the market value if it is in an urban area- At least one member of the displaced family will be provided employment- For land to be acquired, consent of 70% of land-owners is required if the land is acquired for a PPP project and 80% of land-owners if it is a private project.- If the land remains unused for a period of 5 years or the duration specified at the time of acquisition, the land shall be returned back to the land-owners.- Compulsory Social Impact Analysis of all projects was required.Now you need to understand the backdrop of why the UPA (Congress) would pass the bill in 2013. The UPA had a pretty unenviable track record of generating incremental stagflation over its 10-years and public sentiment was against it. On top of that, the nation was gripped by what was called the Modi-wave. Now the Land Acquisiton Act of 2013 was brought in to paint the UPA as pro-poor (whom they had ignored for 10 years and who looked up to Modi to change their situation). The campaign advertisements of the UPA during election time specifically reflected the 4X compensation. Another way they sought to scare this section was to paint Modi as pro-corporates. Whatever industrial growth happened in Gujarat under Modi was painted to be through crony capitalism. The B-team of the Congress- the AAP (sorry AAP supporters, but policy-wise the AAP and Congress are mostly on the same page, be it painting Mr. Modi and BJP as communal, pro-corporate and anti-poor or taking a stance on issues like the Land Acquisition Bill or Net Neutrality) joined in the game with a shriller voice, aided by Mainstream Media and funded by various NGOs.Now consider a practical case- a 100 km highway needs to be built, for which the land of 1 lac land owners is to be acquired. Let us imagine the market value of the land to be 2 lac/ acre (which basically would put the land in a rural area at such a rate). So if a person with a holding of 2 acres has to sell his land, he would be compensated by Rs. 16 lac. BUT, this also requires the consent of 80000 land owners. Remember the land owners are going to be practically illiterate, with no training to make an informed decision. Even then, if there was a way to convince so many people to give up their land, you would have a different problem- the Social Impact Assessment. And it is here where the likes of Medha Patkar, Greenpeace, Ford Foundation will enter to scare the land-owners into not giving their lands, and showcase how the highway is going to damage the entire eco-system of the area which is going to result in increasing instances of hereditary diseases among the nearby residents.The reason I am dwelling on the political aspect is very important here because you need to see the behavior of the opposition parties in the Parliament. The UPA knew it wasn't going to win the 2014 LS elections, but while going, what they could do is to feed the economy with a poison-pill. By passing this law, they intended to make the process of industrial development very difficult for the government which was set to come in their place. Look at how every unrelated, insignificant issue is brought into the Parliament discussions, with the Opposition washing out entire sessions and making demands for the PM to make a statement (which should be an apology to them which they won't accept). Since the legislations on the 2013 bill were very close to the 2014 elections, the BJP could not afford to create a blockade for the passage of the bill- because it would have cost them precious votes. It knew it could amend the obnoxious clauses once it gets power. The UPA and other opposition parties (AAP included) do not wish to see the NDA government showcase an alternative model of economic growth which is inarguably far superior to what they claim to be their model.Now having considered all the above, we can analyze what features the current Bill seeks to retain/change about the Land Acquisition Act, 2013:- The compensation figure has been kept the same despite pressure from industry.- At least one member from a displaced farmer family would have to be provided employment. This is a slight change- from the previous bill which stated that one member from every displaced family would be provided employment. What this tweak will do is it will ensure that farmers' familes would benefit from the provision (and not every other landowner whose land is acquired). Now if one person from a family is employed as a minimum wage worker, the monthly income of the family is going to increase by around Rs. 5-6K/month.- Consent clause and SIA have been exempted for 5 purposes of land acquisition:i) National Security,ii) Defence,iii) Rural Infrastructure including Electrification,iv) Industrial corridorsv) Housing for the poorA lot of hue and cry has been raised over this amendement. I have explained earlier why meeting the consent targets set by the 2013 Act would be difficult to meet. The 80% consent requirement has led to almost no new land acquired for 2 years and projects worth 300 billion dollars have stayed stalled. This has led to hindrance in job growth, and the Opposition gets an opportunity to take potshots at the government over this.It is unreasonable for laypersons to understand the principle of Eminent Domain- the principle states that in any circumstance regarding use of natural resources, the public benefit would trump over the private benefit. What this means is if tomorrow oil is struck under your house, the government is going to acquire your land to set up an oil extraction facility (you then cannot say that the oil-well should belong to you). Therefore in the case of large-scale infrastructure, which benefits the whole nation, individual cannot reserve the right to stall a project on the basis of whether they wish to give up their lands or not.It is worth noting that even Congress ruled states had pressed for the elimination (or at least a lowering) of the Consent clause. But the ultimate decision-maker in the Congress is Sonia.- Another fear which is being created by the Congress and AAP is farmers will (randomly and indiscriminately) lose their land. It is to address this concern of the Opposition that there has been an amendment to the Ordinance, by which only 1 km of land on either side of a highway can be acquired through this route.- Capital Intensive projects have long gestation periods (6-7 years). Imagine if a nuclear power plant is being built, and within 5 years, 70% of it is complete. As per the 2013 Act, since 5 years have lapsed, the land has to be transferred back to the land-owners with an abandoned, incomplete nuclear plant. Does this clause make any sense? And therefore the Ordinance seeks to strike down this clause.- One critically (and by the Opposition, conveniently) ignored provision of the Ordinance is this- the original land owners can buy back 20% of the land after paying the development costs. Now we move back to the example of the 2-acre land-holder. The ordinance gives him the right to buy back 0.4 acres of the land paying for the development cost (let us assume it comes to around 1L). As per the compensation figure, he has already received Rs. 16L. Now he can pay 1L from that to buy back 0.4 acre. But due to the development the market value of the land would have increased 6-7 times at least. So then this 0.4 acre could be sold at (0.4 x 2 x 6) = 4.8 lac.So the net benefit of selling the land over say, 7 years for the land-owner would be (16-1+4.8) = 19.8 lac, with 16 lac upfront and 3.8 lac after 7 years.Plus s/he could use the upfront compensation to buy land elsewhere, build a pucca house, buy more land at a different location. Also one member of his family has got a non-farm income, which will reduce the impact of unruly weather on the family finances.By this way, as many as 4-5 crore households potentially could be provided a better life. Now we come back to discussing politics. Why does AAP and Congress oppose the Bill? If 4 crore households (=20 crore people) benefit from this arrangement, will they ever think of voting for them? Their electoral fortunes rest in a future where the poor remain poor, so that they can make freebie-offers for votes. NDA believes in making the poor financially self-reliant and using them towards national asset-building. And therefore if Modi gets the 10 years of power he is seeking, the nation would forget the existence of leftist parties.If you have concerns about what sort of impact the LAB will have on India's agriculture, I am linking another of my answers here:Kaushal Mhatre's answer to How will the passing of the land acquisition bill in India affect its agricultural sector?

My view would be different from the answers given here - I oppose the Land Acquisition Ordinance, 2014. Please bear with me for this long answer.My opposition to the ordinance stands on two grounds:a) First, because it is an ordinance.As per the Constitution, while the right to pass an ordinance exists in the hands of the Central Government, the Supreme Court has stated, just as Dr. Ambedkar had stated when he was alive while drafting the Constitution, that such a right should only be exercised in the case of an emergency. But was this case an emergency?The Central Government has basically used two reasons to justify its stand.The first is that the emergency was because as per Section 105(3) of the Act passed in 2013, 13 categories of land acquisition (mentioned in Fourth Schedule of the Act) had been exempted from compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement clauses, and that this had to be done within one year of the notification of the act. Since the original act was notified by the President on 1st January 2014, it was necessary to issue a notification in order to fructify this particular section of the original act.In my view, this is a bogus argument on two grounds.The first is pretty simple - all that was required for this was not something passed by the Parliament, but a mere gazette notification issued by the Central Government. It did not even require an ordinance in the first place to begin with, let alone a bill to be introduced in the Parliament.The second is that the Land Acquisition ordinance covers aspects which are unrelated to this particular section of the act. For example, the clauses with regard to exempting 5 more categories of projects from social impact assessment, or the clauses which dilute the provision in the original act that multi-cropped land must be acquired only as a last resort - are not things which had to be included in such an ordinance in case this was the reason for passing the ordinance in emergency.The Central Government has then announced its second reason for the land acquisition business - the economy, and hence the emergency measure was required. As per the Centre, this ordinance was required because the act was hindering/halting economic growth by increasing the cost of land acquisition and making it more difficult for private sector parties to undertake investments which can rejuvenate the economy.This argument of the Centre gets demolished on the simple ground that the nation is not in a state of economic emergency where the government was forced to resort to the ordinance route. There is nothing before us to suggest that this bill was the emergency measure which will suddenly revive investment in India.b) Second, the timing of the ordinance.The original act was notified only on 1st January 2014 and it had not even been properly implemented for 1 whole year - so there were no sample case studies to suggest that land acquisition had become more difficult following the passage and notification of the act. So when the Centre states that the original act had been impeding private sector and PPP investments, it has no evidence before it to back its claim - for if such evidence existed, the government would surely have provided it in the public domain to justify itself.Without the act even being implemented in the first place, the party in government, which actually welcomed the original act and some members of whom actually wanted even more stringent provisions than those in the original act, have made a surprising U-turn on the issue. Rajnath Singh wanted a complete social audit to the scheme, Sushma Swaraj had forced the government to resort to acquiring multi-cropped land only as last resort, and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the bill, headed by the current Speaker, Sumitra Mahajan, had insisted that there were loopholes in the act provided to them which had to be plugged in.Today, the BJP has gone against the advice of its very own members who are in Cabinet or privileged positions - without stating what has changed in 1 year for them to change their stand in public domain.c) Third, my opposition to the text of the ordinance.Let us look at the clauses diluted by the ordinance.1) Consent clauseThe original act had stated that any project would require the consent of at least 80% of land owners if the land is acquired for private projects, and consent of at least 70% of land owners if acquired for PPP projects. The government has announced in the ordinance that five new categories of projects are exempted from the consent clause. These include:i) Defenceii) Rural infrastructure including rural electrification projectsiii) Affordable Housingiv) Industrial Corridorsv) Infrastructure and Social Infrastructure projects, including Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects where the Central Government owns the landThe original clause itself was inadequate since it excluded land acquired by public sector companies, but at least covered the PPP and private sector projects, who constitute a substantial share in total land acquired in India annually. However, this change in the ordinance has repealed the original act totally - along with the thirteen acts mentioned in the original Act for which land acquisition does not require public consent, these five categories add up to about 98% of total land acquired in India. In other words, the original act has been nearly repealed or turned infructuous or useless through this amendment as far as the consent clause is concerned.Consent was an important feature of the original act since the point was that we had been asking a wrong question till 2013 - whether development should take place or not. After all, if development was for public benefit, shouldn't land being acquired for public benefit be acquired through public consent - was the claim of supporters of the bill. This was also in line with the spirit of democracy, where people would determine if they wanted projects to be built up or not. In fact, a major problem with the previous Land Acquisition Act of 1894 was that no consent of land owners or other dependents on the land was required for acquisition of land.By bringing the ordinance, the government literally repealed the democratic nature of land acquisition as was sought to be established through public consent.2) Social Impact AssessmentThe Land Acquisition Act of 2013 had introduced the principle of 'Social Impact Assessment' or SIA, which was about studying the impact of any project on the lives of those living on the concerned land. The study was supposed to be finished in a period of within 6-7 months as per the act and the assessment was to be presented in a public hearing involving those affected after this duration - following which public comments were to be considered while taking the final decision on land acquisition.The ordinance though has turned this whole process meaningless since it has exempted the above-mentioned five categories from the SIA process. SIA was important as it was necessary to identify those who were to be impacted by the project - land-owners and other dependents on land not just being acquired but also those living nearby who would be impacted by pollution and other issues due to the project. As stated above, since the categories concerned would cover a major share of land acquisition for various projects, this clause exemption would effectively render the act meaningless as well.3) Restrictions on multi-cropped landWhen the original act was drafted, there were heated debates that land acquisition should not impact the food security of the nation. Keeping this in mind, it was accepted by both houses of the Parliament that multi-cropped land should be acquired only as a last resort and only up to certain limit. Even this was not considered as appropriate by some speakers in the Parliament while debating the bill - including those from BJP - Rajnath Singh, and Vinay Katiyar.However, the above-mentioned ordinance actually means that for the above-mentioned five categories, no restrictions exist with regard to acquiring multi-cropped land. In India, major controversies on land acquisition have often happened when such land was sought to be acquired - be it Nandigram/Singur or Andhra Pradesh. Considering all this, to have allowed such land to be acquired for these projects without having thought on the impact on national food security, seems a contradiction when considered along with the stand the government has taken in WTO, where it has asked for spending on food security and other agrarian subsidies to continue indefinitely till the time a permanent solution has been found.4) Acquisition for private hospitals and educational institutionsA major problem with the ordinance is also that unlike the original act which did not allow acquisition of land for private hospitals and/or educational institutions, this ordinance actually allows such acquisition by including these activities under the ambit of public purpose. This is totally ridiculous for the same reason in both cases.Most private educational institutions and hospitals in this country are either owned by corporates or those belonging to political parties (sometimes both these are the same) - and it is not as if such institutions actually implement reservation for local/poor students/patients as demanded legally by the Right to Education or other laws as required in actual spirit. In particular, we see private colleges these days as money-making bodies which only admit those from richer or better-off backgrounds while not having great educational quality standards. The Delhi High Court has been running after the hospitals in Delhi and has asked them repeatedly to admit the poor patients for free in return for the subsidies they get from Central and state governments - without the hospitals having ever obeyed these in practice. Even news channels have got tired of doing stings on this issue knowing well that nothing changes.Finally, I wish to incorporate some practical aspects which actually happen in this country - which are not covered in this law.In this country, we have lots of laws and notifications and rules which actually get flouted over the long-term, also involving multiple litigations - leading to nothing. Take the idea of affordable housing - a type of project exempted from consent and social impact assessment as also acquisition of multi-cropped land. In Maharashtra, there are cases where initially, those constructing such houses agreed that a certain percentage of houses would be given to poor for reduced rates or nearly-free - but when it came to actual implementation, the result was zero. Following this, in such cases, cases were imposed on such builders but they have been stuck and mired in our legal system through adjournments and collusion of authorities and judges with such builders. Similarly, the word "infrastructure and social infrastructure" is so loosely defined as the category to be exempted, that as long as government acquires land first and then gives it to private parties at the rates it wants, it can be used to justify any and every kind of acquisition - that is the kind of loophole which has been created.The only improvement left as it is in the current Act compared to the 1894 one (with the ordinance in force) is that those whose land is acquired will be compensated, rehabilitated and resettled - but this can and will be done without their consent or social impact assessment. This could have been understood if we were an autocratic country like China - in a democracy though, the move is questionable. A humane and ethical law has been dismantled without letting people decide on the kind of development they wanted - it is the state which will now decide this.Keeping all these things in mind, I think it was not an appropriate move to amend the Act.Sources:MUST read: All you wanted to know about ordinancePage on indiacode.nic.inPage on prsindia.orgPage on prsindia.orgWhy the BJP is finding it hard to resist the lure of old-style land acquisitionLand Acquisition Act: Ordinance also dilutes clause on return of unused acquired landLand acquisition process gets its cruel ways backTruth vs Hype: The Myth of Land AcquisitionFencing the farmer outWhy Land Ordinance of Modi Government is Anti-PeopleNo end to battle over landभूमि-अधिग्रहण अध्यादेश: अलोकतांत्रिक, असंवैधानिक और अनैतिकNote: The exemption for social infrastructure in category of exempted projects has been removed, but all other provisions stand as it is as of now.

The land acquisition process in NHAI is governed by The National Highways Act,1956.The Department of Land Resources (DoLR) is administering the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (RFCTLARR Act). This Act came into force on 01.01.2014 by repealing the Land Acquisition Act, 1894.The Amendment Bill passed by the Lok Sabha in March 2015 extended the compensation in accordance with the RFCTLARR Act to the thirteen Acts (The National Highways Act,1956 being one of them) mentioned in the Fourth Schedule of the RFCTLARR Act, 2013.Thus, NHAI follows the RFCTLARR Act, 2013 (Section 26 to 30) for determining compensation rules for land acquisition.To understand the Compensation Rules according to RFCTLARR Act 2013, first we need to understand some basic terms:Market Value (determined as per the section 26) : The Collector shall adopt the following criteria in assessing and determining the market value of the land:higher of :(a) the market value, if any. specified in the lndian Stamp Act, 1899.(b) the average of top 50% of the sale deeds in similar type of land situated in the nearest village or nearest vicinity area(c) consented amount of compensation as agreed upon in case of acquisition of lands for private companies or for public private partnership projects2. Factor:(a) Factor by which the market value is to be multiplied in the case of rural areas: 1.00 (One) to 2.00 (Two) based on the distance of project from urban area, as may be notified by the appropriate Government.(b) Factor by which the market value is to be multiplied in the case of urban areas: 1.00 (One)3. Value of assets attached to land or building (determined as per the section 29) : Building and other immovable property, trees and plants attached to the land acquired, standing crops damaged during-the process of land acquisition. The valuation is done by competent engineers and experienced persons in that field.4. Compensation Amount: Total compensation to be paid. Equals to market value + assets.5. Solatium : 'Solatium' amount equivalent to one hundred per cent. of the compensation amount, shall be paid in addition to the compensation payable to any person whose land has been acquired.6. Interest : calculated at the rate of twelve per cent (12%) per annum on such market value for the period commencing on and from the date of the publication of the notification of acquisition in respect of such land, till the date of the award of the Collector or the date of taking possession of the land, whichever is earlier.7. Final Award : The final amount which is given.Now to understand the legalistic and complicated language of the act and to make the calculation process simpler, I will use variables to represent the following parameters and arrive at final award:Market Value = MFactor =FAssets = ACompensation Amount = CSolatium = SInterest = IThe following are the formulas used for arriving at the final award:C=M+AI=C* 12% * Time in years . (Simple Interest)S=(M*F)+AFinal Award = (M*F)+A+S+I (or 2S+I)NOTE: If the land belongs to Govt, then no compensation is paid for the land. But, if there is an asset built over that Govt land (Abadi), then NHAI pays the compensation only for assets.NOTE: If half room is affected in the acquisition, the valuation shall be done till the next beam (or pillar support) of that room.Hope it helps.