The Centre on Wednesday suffered a setback after the Supreme Court refused to reconsider its 2019 judgment by which it had ruled that that the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) must pay solatium and interest to thousands of landowners across the country from 1997 till September 18, 2019, whose lands it had acquired over the years for the construction of highways.

The apex court said the constitutional guarantee of compensation cannot be rendered contingent upon the financial burden of the government, as it rejected the Centre’s plea that if the 2019 judgment rendered in the Tarsem Singh case is not recalled, it would impose a huge burden of ₹29,000 crore on the exchequer and not just ₹100 crore as anticipated earlier.

"At the outset, it must be clarified that while the corrected estimate of the monetary costs is taken on record, the same does not persuade us to revisit the merits of the earlier adjudication. This court had unequivocally held that the fiscal implications of granting solatium and interest cannot override the substantive entitlement of land-losers," a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan said.