Before 2013, acquisition of land in India by the state was governed by the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 which was patently unfair to marginalized landlowners. In 2013, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act was passed, which sought to correct historical wrongs in the process of land acquisition by the state for development projects and insisted on fair compensation for landowners, past and present. However, since then the Indian Supreme Court has attenuated the provisions of the forward thinking 2013 law by hollowing it out and narrowing the scope for poor and marginalized landowners to bring compensation cases before the courts, and in doing so, simplifying the hurdles presented by that law before the business community. Arpitha Kodiveri does a deep dive in this essay where she says that at stake is the undoing of progressive jurisprudence surrounding the retrospective clause. This is significant as land conflicts in India are on the rise. India with its ambitious growth trajectory is likely to demand more land for development. The application of the retrospective clause could have addressed the unrest in cases where ill-thought-out acquisition had taken place under the older law but instead, the Modi government has been trying hard to return to the older draconian legal framework of acquisition.