Right to Property under Indian Constitution

The Fundamental Rights are defined as basic human freedoms which every Indian citizen has the right to enjoy for a proper and harmonious development of personality. These rights universally apply to all citizens, irrespective of race, place of birth, religion, caste, creed, color or Gender. They are enforceable by the courts, subject to certain restrictions. The Rights have their origins in many sources, including England's Bill of Rights, the United States Bill of Rights and France's Declaration of the Rights of Man

The Fundamental Rights in Indian constitution under Part III acts as a guarantee that all Indian citizens can and will live their life’s in peace as long as they live in Indian democracy. They include individual rights common to most liberal democracies, such as equality before the law, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of association and peaceful assembly, freedom of religion, and the right to constitutional remedies for the protection of civil right.

Right to property

Part 3rd of the Indian Constitution deals with Fundamental Rights of the People. Originally there are Seven Fundamental Rights are in the Constitution and the right to property was also included in the Fundamental Rights, however, the Forty-Fourth Amendment, passed in 1978, revised the status of property rights by stating that "No person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law." After that the Right to property originally a fundamental right, is now become a legal right.

 The Constitution originally provided for the right to property under Articles 19 and 31.

Article 19 guaranteed to all citizens the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property

Article 31 provided that "no person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law." It also provided that compensation would be paid to a person whose property has been taken for public purposes.

The provisions relating to the right to property were changed a number of times.

The right to property has been the one which was subjected to the largest number of Amendments.

The First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Seventeenth Amendment, Twenty-fifth Amendment, Forty- second Amendment, Forty-third Amendment and finally the Forty-fourth Amendment have all tried to modify the right in some form or other

The Forty-Forth Amendment of 1978 deleted the right to property from the list of fundamental rights.

A new provision, Article 300-A, was added to the constitution which provided that "no person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law". Thus if a legislature makes a law depriving a person of his property, there would be no obligation on the part of the State to pay anything as compensation. The aggrieved person shall have no right to move the court under Article 32.

Thus, the right to property is no longer a fundamental right, though it is still a constitutional right. If the government appears to have acted unfairly, the action can be challenged in a court of law by citizens.

As in 2007 the Supreme Court unanimously said that the fundamental rights are a basic structure of the constitution and cannot be removed or diluted. .

The liberalization of the economy and the government’s initiative to set up special economic zones has led to many protests by farmers and has led to calls for the reinstatement of the fundamental right to private property.

The Supreme Court has sent a notice to the government questioning why the right should not be brought back but in 2010 the court rejected the PIL. 

In 2011 the Supreme Court said the right to property is a constitutional right and government cannot deprive a person of his land in an arbitrary manner. A bench of justices G S Singhvi and A K Ganguly said in a judgment that courts should view with "suspicion" the action of the government in acquiring land for private parties in the name of urgency.