The Land Acquisition Bill is as good as dead, but it is not too late to ease it by amending the rules governing the UPA’s bill. One obvious thing to do is to tell states to legislate what they want and allow it to override the central law. Another way out is innovative rule-making even under the old law. For example, there is no way to avoid the Social Impact Assessment (SIA) even for major infrastructure projects. A simple way to ease things would be to make a rule that says SIA has to be completed within 45 days of a notification on land acquisition. One can be sure that more such rules can be tweaked to make them work faster, even if they cannot be done away with. The main cost in land acquisition is time, not money. Time is what can be crunched through executive action.