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Land Lease Bill
The Supreme Court has cautioned states against their "land-for-land" policies and said such schemes should be floated in rarest of the rare cases. A bench of Justices J B Pardiwala and R Mahadevan further said a plea of deprivation of right to livelihood under Article 21 of the Constitution to oppose the land acquisition by the state was unsustainable as it called the litigation pursued by Haryana as an eye opener" for all states. The bench was acting on a batch of pleas filed by the Estate Officer of Haryana Urban Development Authority and others challenging the Punjab and Haryana High Court's 2016 decision that upheld the trial court decrees favoring oustees. We have made ourselves very explicitly clear that in cases of land acquisition the plea of deprivation of right to livelihood under Article 21 of the Constitution is unsustainable, Justice Pardiwala said in a 88-page verdict on July 14. The high court held displaced landowners, whose land was acquired by Haryana authorities
Claiming that Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has been occupying parts of a plot of land in an "unauthorised" manner in West Bengal's Santiniketan, the Visva Bharati has urged the economist to hand over that portion to the central university. A letter signed by the deputy registrar of the university on Tuesday said the residence of the noted economist has been built on an area, which covers extra 13 decimals of land. The university also said it was ready to undertake a joint survey of its representatives and the surveyor or advocate deputed by Sen to verify the claims if he wanted. "It has been found from records and physical survey/demarcation that you are in unauthorised occupation of 13 decimals of land belonging to Visva Bharati..." the letter said. "You are requested to hand over the said 13 decimals of land to the university at the earliest," it added. The Nobel laureate's father Asutosh Sen had taken 125 decimals of land on lease from the varsity in 1943, its spokesperson Mahua