This paper focuses on two aspects of the laws that govern the acquisition and transfer of agricultural land for other purposes: (a) litigation over compensation, and (b) the regulatory impediments obstructing voluntary land transactions. It shows that there is excessive litigation under the current land acquisition law. It is argued that any compulsory acquisition-based process is inherently prone to litigation, even if accompanied by presumably benevolent schemes such as land-for-land and the rehabilitation and resettlement packages.

This study, based on a large dataset of 894 projects from 17 infrastructure sectors, attempts to answer certain important questions on time and cost overruns in publicly-funded infrastructure projects: How common and how large are the overruns? What are the essential causes? Are contractual and institutional failures among the significant causes?

The B K Chaturvedi Committee, set up to recommend ways to expedite the National Highways Development Project, seems to have been guided by the misconception that infrastructure can be built by simply doling out additional concessions to the investors.