Resettlement and Rehabilitation of Tribals: Policies, Problems and Persistent Gaps

For decades, when a dam, mine, or highway displaced a family, there was no national rulebook telling the government what it owed them. Compensation depended on the mood of the local project authority, not on law. This gap hit tribal communities the hardest, since their lands and forests are usually where such projects land first. The story of India’s resettlement and rehabilitation, or R&R, policy is really the story of a country slowly, and still incompletely, learning to answer the question: what do we owe the people we displace in the name of development?

The long wait for a national policy 🔗

Land acquisition in India ran on a 19th-century law, the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, for over a hundred years. That law dealt with taking land, not with what happened to the people who lost it. There was no requirement to rehabilitate anyone. States and individual project authorities occasionally wrote their own rules, but nothing bound the whole country.

This changed only in 2003, when the government notified the National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation for Project Affected Families. It was the first time India acknowledged, on paper, that displacement causes more than a loss of property. The policy explicitly noted that cash compensation alone rarely lets a family buy back farmland, a home, or a livelihood, and that this problem is sharper for tribal people, small farmers, and women who depend heavily on the land they are losing.

But the 2003 policy had teeth made of paper. It was advisory rather than legally binding, so no one could be taken to court for ignoring it. Within four years, the government replaced it with the National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy of 2007, which tried to fix some of these gaps by promoting land-based rehabilitation, meaning families would get agricultural land instead of just a cheque. Even this revised version, though, remained a policy statement rather than a statute, and it only applied automatically to fairly large projects, leaving many smaller but still disruptive acquisitions outside its scope.

2013: displacement finally gets a law 🔗

The real shift came with the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, usually shortened to the LARR Act or RFCTLARR Act. It came into force on 1 January 2014 and finally replaced the colonial-era 1894 law. For the first time, rehabilitation and resettlement were written into a binding statute rather than a policy that officials could quietly sidestep.

The Act tried to correct some of the most common complaints against the older system. According to the legislative summary from PRS India, it mandated compensation of up to four times the market value in rural areas and twice the market value in urban areas, and required the consent of 80 percent of affected families before land could be acquired for private companies or public-private partnerships. It also made a Social Impact Assessment compulsory before acquisition, so that the effect on livelihoods, drinking water sources, grazing land, and even burial grounds would be studied in advance rather than discovered after the bulldozers arrived.

On paper, this was a major step forward. In practice, the Act carved out exemptions for acquisitions under 16 other laws, including those covering railways, atomic energy, and special economic zones, which meant a large share of land acquisition in the country still happened outside its full protections. Implementation on the ground has also been uneven, with several states amending or diluting provisions of the central law to speed up project clearances.

Why R&R still goes wrong on the ground 🔗

A law existing is not the same as a law working. Even after 2014, families displaced by projects routinely report the same set of problems that predate the Act by decades.

Vague rules, arbitrary decisions 🔗

Much of the trouble starts with how loosely R&R obligations get defined and enforced at the project level. Project authorities frequently decide entitlements on their own terms, without clear, uniform criteria applied consistently across families in the same project. This leaves room for favoritism, delay, and disputes that displaced families have little power to contest, especially when they lack formal documentation of land rights, which is common in tribal areas governed by customary rather than titled land tenure.

Protests treated as a law-and-order problem 🔗

When affected communities organize to demand fair terms, the response is often to treat the protest itself as the issue rather than the grievance behind it. Movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan, which grew out of resistance to the Sardar Sarovar Dam, are frequently remembered more for the confrontation they generated than for the legitimate rehabilitation failures they were pointing to. Genuine grievance redress mechanisms at the village and family level remain weak, so protest becomes one of the few tools left to displaced communities to be heard at all.

Entitlements that exist on paper but not in practice 🔗

Even where a Social Impact Assessment or R&R package is technically completed, it can end up being a formality rather than a genuine safeguard, with reports sometimes structured to justify a project’s approval rather than test its impact. National oversight bodies meant to monitor large projects have struggled to resolve disputes even in high-profile cases, which signals how weak the accountability chain is once acquisition begins.

The disproportionate weight tribals carry 🔗

Numbers make the imbalance hard to miss. Scheduled Tribes make up roughly 8 to 8.6 percent of India’s population, yet they have consistently accounted for a share of displaced persons several times larger than their population share. One estimate places tribal communities at close to 40 percent of everyone displaced by development projects nationally, largely because tribal regions overlap heavily with the forests, rivers, and mineral belts that large infrastructure and mining projects target.

The resettlement side of the ledger looks far worse than the displacement side. Research tracking displacement between 1951 and 1990 found that more than 8.5 million tribal people were displaced in that period, accounting for around 60 percent of all displacement from major projects such as dams, yet only about a quarter of them were ever formally resettled. That leaves a large majority of displaced tribal families essentially unaccounted for in any rehabilitation programme, years or decades after losing their land.

Losses that get undercounted, compensation that falls short 🔗

Valuation is one of the quieter but more damaging problems. Land records in tribal areas are often incomplete or based on customary rather than formal titles, and this makes it easy for a family’s real loss, in terms of crop yield, forest produce, grazing access, or common village resources, to be assessed at far below its actual worth. Compensation calculated only on registered land value ignores livelihoods that depend on forests and commons, which many tribal households rely on more than settled agricultural land alone.

Land for land, but not land that works 🔗

Where the law does provide replacement land instead of only cash, the quality of that land frequently undermines the intent behind the provision. Families are sometimes allotted land that is rocky, poorly irrigated, or simply unsuited to the crops they traditionally grew, which means even a technically fulfilled entitlement fails to restore their earlier standard of living. Over time, this pushes many resettled families into debt or forces them to seek daily wage labour instead of the subsistence farming they were used to, deepening the very marginalisation the R&R framework was supposed to prevent.

Where this leaves the policy conversation 🔗

India has moved from having no rehabilitation framework at all to having a binding national law within roughly a decade. That is real progress, and the LARR Act’s Social Impact Assessment requirement and consent thresholds are genuine improvements over the blank silence of the 1894 law. But the gap between what the law promises and what displaced tribal families actually receive remains wide. Vague implementation, undervalued compensation, poor-quality replacement land, and weak grievance mechanisms all point to the same underlying issue: a legal framework only protects people to the extent that it is enforced, monitored, and taken seriously at the project level.

For a community that already carries a disproportionate share of India’s development costs, that gap between law and practice is not a technical detail. It is the difference between a policy that reads well and a policy that actually rebuilds a life.

What do you think? Should India’s R&R framework treat land-based rehabilitation as a stronger legal right rather than a discretionary option, and would independent, community-led social impact audits do more to close the implementation gap than government oversight committees currently do?

References

1. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/India_Policy-AffectedFamilies_2003.pdf
2. https://www.teriin.org/sites/default/files/2018-10/Conference%20Note_session_4.pdf
3. https://dolr.gov.in/en/act-rules/
4. https://prsindia.org/billtrack/the-right-to-fair-compensation-and-transparency-in-land-acquisition-rehabilitation-and-resettlement-bill-2013
5. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43545-026-01385-w
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00219096231168064