The Allahabad High Court held that compensation awarded for land in a different village can still be used as a benchmark to fix compensation for the land being acquired, if the two locations are comparable. This applies even when the strict same-village, same-notification rule does not technically apply.
What this changes for a title check
Land acquisition compensation is usually fixed by looking at what was paid for nearby land under the same acquisition notification. This ruling widens that comparison to land in a different village, so long as the location, access, and use are similar. For someone assessing what a landowner is likely to get, or checking whether a past award was fair, this means the comparison set is not limited to the exact village named in the notification. A lawyer building a compensation case, or checking whether an award already paid was reasonable, should now also pull awards from neighbouring villages with similar road access, market proximity, or land use, since the court can accept those as valid evidence of market value even outside the acquired village's own boundary.