Shri. Het Ram (Deceased) Through Lrs & ... vs . Union Of India & Anr. on 20 December, 2022
payable to the owner of the land is the market value which is
determined by reference to the price which a seller might
reasonably expect to obtain from a willing purchaser, bat as
this may not be possible to ascertain with any amount of
precision, the authority charged with the duty to award
compensation is bound to make an estimate judged by an
objective standard. The land acqui red has, therefore, to be
valued not only with reference to its condition at the time of the
declaration under section 4 of the Act but its potential value
also must be taken into account. The saleĀdeeds of the lands
situated in the vicinity and the comparable benefits and
advantages which they have, furnish a rough and ready method
of computing the market value. This, however, is not the only
method. The rent which an owner was actually receiving at the
relevant point of time or the rent which the neighbouring lands
of similar nature are fetching can be taken into account by
capitalising the rent which according to the present prevailing
rate of interest is 20 times the annual rent. But this also is not a
conclusive method.This Court had in Special Land Acquisition
Officer, Bangalore v. T. Adinarayan Setty(1), indicated at page
412 the methods of valuation to be adopted in ascertaining the
market value of the land on the date of the notificatioa under
section 4(1) which are : (i) opinion of experts, (ii) the price paid
within a reasonable time in bona fide transactions of
purchase ,of the lands acquired or the lands adjacent to the
lands acquired and possessing similar advantages; and (iii) a
number of years' purchase of the actual or immediately
prospective profits of the lands acquired. These methods,
however, do not preclude the Court from taking any other
special circumstances into consideration, the requirement being
always to arrive as near as possible an estimate of the market
value. In arriving to a reasonably correct market value, it may
be necessary to take even two or all of those methods into
account inasmuch as the exact valuation is not always possible
as no two lands may be the same either in respect of the
situation or the extent or the potentially nor is it possible in all
cases to have reliable material from which that valuation can
be accurately determined."