Discuss the socio-economic and environmental challenges associated with land acquisition for greenfield infrastructure projects in India, with reference to a recent case.

Under the Greenfield Airports Policy, 2008, the State identifies the site and acquires land while the Centre grants clearance [3]. The Parandur airport in Tamil Nadu — announced in 2022 and scrapped in August 2026 — shows how such projects falter less on finance than on livelihood and ecological costs.

Socio-economic challenges

• Livelihood, not land price: Parandur required nearly 5,700 acres across 17 revenue villages; farmers rejected compensation at 3.5 times market value and protested continuously in Walajabad block [4]. Cash cannot substitute an assured agrarian income stream.
• Weak rehabilitation delivery: the RFCTLARR Act, 2013 mandates social impact assessment, consent and resettlement entitlements [1], yet perceived procedural haste erodes trust and invites litigation.
• Excluded groups: tenants, sharecroppers and landless labourers depend on the land but rarely appear on compensation rolls.
• Sunk costs: about 1,100 acres were taken and ₹850 crore disbursed before abandonment [4] — public money spent without an asset.

Environmental challenges

• Wetland loss: roughly 1,000 of about 4,000 acres were water bodies [4]; their reclamation is restricted for notified wetlands under the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017 [2], and is critical in flood-prone Chennai.
• Farmland conversion: over 3,000 acres of irrigated cropland would have gone out of cultivation, with food-security and groundwater implications.
• Cumulative impacts: hydrological and drainage effects extend well beyond the project boundary, and are poorly captured in site-specific appraisal [3].

Governance dimension

• Long gestation invites reversal: the idea dates to 1998, the site to 2022, and cancellation to 2026 — with capacity now to be met by Terminal 5 at the existing airport (30 to 55 million passengers) built by AAI [4].

Land acquisition thus fails where it treats land as a priced commodity rather than a social ecosystem. A brownfield-first appraisal, genuine consent-based social impact assessment, wetland-sensitive siting, and land-pooling models that give landowners a stake in the completed asset can align infrastructure growth with livelihood security and SDG-11's sustainable-settlement goal.