Karnataka’s Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) has knocked on State Government’s door for help. This is because despite passing judgements against defaulting realtors and builders, the authority has been unable to help the aggrieved home-buyers due to lack of support from deputy commissioners.
The regulator has been able to provide compensation to the home-buyer in only one of the 288 cases.
In a letter written to the Department of Revenue and Housing, the authority has complained that the Deputy Commissioners of Bengaluru Urban, Dakshina Kannada and Dharwad are not honouring the judgements of RERA Karnataka.
Of the 288 cases, 285 pertain to the Bengaluru Urban district.
“We have, time and again, written to the Deputy Commissioners to recover penalty and compensation from the defaulting developers and builders. There is only one instance of dues being recovered. Even the immovable property of the defaulting builder has not been seized. We have been receiving requests and complaints from aggrieved home-buyers as they are not seeing the benefits of RERA Act,” secretary KS Latha Kumari said in the letter.
The real estate regulator wrote to the government only after several reminders to Deputy Commissioners and the Regional Commissioner, Bengaluru, failed to get any favourable action.
As per the Act, RERA only has powers to pass judgements related to real-estate cases while the authority to recover dues and compensation lies with the Revenue Department.
The letter, dated January 2020, also lists out names of 288 developers and the project from whom a total of Rs 118 crore has to be recovered. While Ithaca Estates Pvt Ltd has the highest number of cases (66) against them, there are 27 cases against Unishire Housing. Nitesh Housing Developers, Mantri Developers, Sanchaya Land & Estate Pvt. Ltd. and ARV Infrastructures have 23, 19, 18 and 16 cases respectively.
The birth of RERA in July 2017 had received much support among the home-buyers as it had promised speedy justice to people, who would invest a life-time of their savings to buy a property.
Over the years, the authority has registered over 3,000 complaints and passed at least 288 judgements. While the disputes were settled in some cases, hundreds of home-buyers are still awaiting justice.
Recently, the real-estate regulator had pitched to emulate the Madhya Pradesh model where RERA could have its own executing officer with the powers of the civil and revenue court. This, the officials and home-buyers believe, could do away the need for depending on deputy commissioners to act on the judgements passed by the Authority.
Manjunath Prasad, Principal Secretary of the Revenue Department acknowledged the receipt of the letter written by RERA. “I have gone through the letter written by the RERA secretary. I will give instructions to the DCs concerned to recover the money at the earliest,” he promised.
Regional Commissioner VP Ikkeri said he was unaware of the letter, saying he took over the post only recently. Bengaluru DC GN Shivamurthy, under whom a majority of the cases fall, did not respond to calls.
