Paid on Paper, Missing From the List: Where Rehabilitation Breaks Down at Majhgaon

The Payment Figure Counts Owners. The Protest Comes From Families.

The Commitment The **Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act,

2013** makes two promises that matter here.

• Every adult, of either gender, with or without a spouse or children, is treated as a separate family entitled to their own rehabilitation benefits.
• For irrigation projects, families losing land should be offered land for land where it is available. The Supreme Court, in the Narmada Bachao Andolan rulings, added a third principle: rehabilitation must be completed before submergence.

The Data The Majhgaon Medium Irrigation Project in

Panna district costs ₹693 crore, needs 1,552 hectares and is planned to irrigate 8,370 hectares across 43 villages, as reported. It displaces 1,450 families in four villages. Official records seen by The Hindu show:

• Land compensation of ₹194.86 crore paid to 97.43% of 1,006 landowners.
• A ₹5 lakh rehabilitation payment to 1,219 of the 1,450 displaced families.
• 231 families still unpaid, which the Collector attributes to inheritance cases and missing documents. The State raised the package to ₹12.5 lakh in July 2026 and the Cabinet announced ₹300 crore more.

Where It Breaks Read the

numbers closely. The 97.43% figure measures payments to landowners. The protest is about families and the two are not the same group. A widow whose husband held the land or a married adult son who lives in the same house, does not appear in the land records.

Under the LARR Act, both should count as separate families for rehabilitation. Villagers say exactly these people are missing from the rehabilitation lists. The breakdown is therefore not in funding. The money has been sanctioned and raised.

It is in enumeration, the survey and list-making stage handled by revenue officials at village level. That is also where the corruption allegations sit. Villagers say brick houses were valued as mud ones and that middlemen demand bribes.

In September 2026, the Lokayukta arrested a revenue officer in Panna for taking a ₹47,000 bribe from a tribal man affected by Ken-Betwa, in exchange for raising his compensation. The 16 February 2024 cut-off compounds the problem.

Families formed after that date, through marriage or sons coming of age, are excluded, even though acquisition began in 2018 and payments have come in small instalments since then.

What Is Working Credit is

due where it is earned. The package rose from ₹5 lakh to ₹12.5 lakh because of earlier protest. The Collector has acknowledged the problem and sent officials village to village. She has also required joint accounts for couples, after women complained that the first payment went to the male head of family and was often spent on liquor. The Lokayukta has acted against at least one corrupt official.

Why This Matters for the Exam

The lesson for GS3 is that a compliance percentage can be accurate and still misleading. When answering on rehabilitation, distinguish the land-acquisition ledger from the rehabilitation entitlement and name the link that breaks: the village-level list, not the budget.