The Supreme Court quashed sixteen Lok Adalat awards apportioning land acquisition compensation because not every claimant with a competing interest had signed or consented to the settlement. It sent the compensation dispute back for a fresh hearing, holding that a Lok Adalat award binds only the parties who actually agreed to it.
What this changes for a title check
A Lok Adalat award is often treated as a clean, court-sanctioned closure of a compensation or apportionment dispute, but this ruling says it only binds signatories under Section 29 of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. When a title or valuation check turns up a Lok Adalat award behind an acquired parcel, the document to ask for now is the list of consenting parties and their signatures, not just the award itself. If a disputing claimant was left out, the award can be reopened years later and the apportionment remains genuinely unsettled, which is a live risk for anyone relying on that compensation record as proof of a clean acquisition. The judgment also flags that a High Court order for disbursement made while the award itself was under challenge was itself an error, so a pending challenge to an award is a fact worth surfacing even if compensation was already paid out.