Land as a Resource
Chapter Forty-Nine
Syllabus topic 2, "Land"
Pages 207 to 210 of 885
In one line
Land is three resources stacked on one another, and the law treats each differently: what is under it, what grows on it, and the surface itself.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: land as a resource comprises the sub-soil, being the minerals, oil, gas and ground water beneath it; the biotic cover, being the forest, the soil and the wildlife on it; and the surface, being space for cultivation, settlement, industry and infrastructure; and Indian law regulates each by a different statute, a different authority and a different test, so that a single field may be governed at once by the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957, the Indian Forest Act, 1927, and the State town planning law.
Why land is harder than water
Because land is fixed and the uses compete for the same square metre.
Water flows past and can be shared over time: an upper riparian takes and the stream still reaches the lower one. Land cannot be shared that way. A hectare under a quarry is not a hectare under a crop, and it is not a hectare of forest. Every allocation of land is an exclusion.
Because the surface owner is not the resource owner. A person may own a field and not own what is under it, and even where he owns the minerals he may not take them without a concession. The chapter after next works that out.
And because a decision about land is almost always irreversible in practice. A quarried hill does not grow back. A forest cleared for a road is not restored by planting elsewhere, whatever the compensatory afforestation law says. That irreversibility is why the precautionary principle does most of its work in this module.
The three layers, and the law for each
| Layer | What it is | The law | The regulator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sub-soil | Minerals, coal, oil and gas, ground water, atomic minerals | Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957; the Coal Bearing Areas Act, 1957; the Oilfields Act, 1948; the Atomic Energy Act, 1962; State groundwater law | The Union for major minerals; the State for minor minerals and for ground water |
| Biotic cover | Forest, soil, wildlife, biodiversity | Indian Forest Act, 1927; Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, 1980; Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972; Biological Diversity Act, 2002 | The State forest department, with the Union's approval for diversion |
| Surface | Agriculture, settlement, industry, infrastructure, heritage | State land revenue codes; town planning law; the 2013 land acquisition Act; the Ancient Monuments Act, 1958 | The Collector, the planning authority, and the Archaeological Survey |
A student who can produce that table can answer any land question MU has set, because every one of her land questions is about one row, or about a conflict between two of them.
The rest of this chapter
Module one is free. The rest of this chapter comes with the LL.M. Environment and Legal Order Semester 1 notes.
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The rest of this subject
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