Land pooling revived the old town-planning-scheme technique as an alternative to outright acquisition: landowners surrender holdings to a pool, the agency lays out roads, services and plots, and returns a smaller, serviced and higher-value plot to each owner. Delhi notified a land-pooling policy from 2013, building on long Gujarat practice, and Andhra Pradesh used it on a vast scale to assemble land for the new capital Amaravati. It is promoted as a less coercive, self-financing route to planned extension, though it raises questions of equity and farmer consent. The technique has spread across several states.
It revived plot-reconstitution as the leading consent-based alternative to compulsory acquisition for assembling land for planned urban extension.
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