Compensation for Compulsory Land Acquisition; Does Social Sustainability Matters on Satisfaction

Abstract

Payment of compensation for different types of losses are continuously experiencing in Sri Lanka. One of the typical aspects is the compulsory land acquisition. Government acquires the lands from private landowners for providing infrastructure in terms of public interest and proceeds to pay the monetary compensation recovering the losses while the National Involuntary Resettlement Policy (NIRP) intends to address involuntary resettlement because of land acquisition. However, distrusting is arising on satisfaction of the victims of this process and no evidence how far the social sustainability concept is addressed. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the determinants of satisfaction while focusing on the factors representing the social sustainability concept in compensation procedure of compulsory land acquisition of Sri Lanka. For acquiring data, questionnaire survey was conducted with 30 re-settlers who were the victims of government land acquisition for a reservoir project and an interview was carried out with prominent community leaders on 09 factors. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and a content analysis. The findings reveal that social sustainability aspects of neighborhood environment, education, market availability, electricity, and public health services were successful to some extent, while there were significant inconsistencies amongst assessed components within individual cases. Hence, the study reveals that pure monetary compensation process was unsuccessful since it represents the inadequacy to cover all losses of victims. Thus, for a total loss a resettling strategy is essential along with high concentration on the social sustainability aspects.

Keywords: Compulsory Land Acquisition, Involuntary Resettlement Policy, Payment of Compensation, Social Sustainability Concept, Satisfaction