Since its establishment in 2017, with the first case being taken on September 4, 2018, UP-RERA has issued recovery certificates (RCs) worth a staggering Rs 3,105 crore in favor of 8,575 home buyers.
This comes after real estate developers failed to fulfill their promise of delivering homes, as per an official press statement released on Wednesday by Pramod Kumar Upadhyay, the secretary of the Uttar Pradesh Real Estate Regulatory Authority.
However, what is even more disheartening to note is that only one-fourth of this total amount has been recovered by the state’s revenue department. According to UP-RERA, a sum of Rs 630.70 crore has found its way into the accounts of 3,421 complainants. Additionally, recovery certificates worth Rs 338.17 crore have been mutually settled in 1,185 cases involving promoters/developers and home buyers.
The regulatory authority has revealed that they have received approximately 50,900 complaints so far and have resolved around 43,930 complaints filed by distressed allottees. This indicates that the number of complaints filed accounts for about 39% of the total in the country, while the resolution of these complaints stands at about 40%.
To manage this overwhelming influx of homebuyer complaints, UP-RERA introduced e-courts in February 2020. Since its launch, more than 27,100 victims have utilized the e-Court module to file complaints, with over 20,700 cases being resolved by the authority.
The real estate authority is currently in the process of integrating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies into their official website. This initiative aims to streamline the process of complaint filing and resolution, ultimately reducing the time taken to issue judgments or orders. The anticipated completion date for this enhanced website version is by the end of this year.
Moreover, UP-RERA asserts that they have registered over 3,470 real estate projects thus far, with 125 new projects having been registered in the current financial year up until August 2023.
Breaking down the numbers, out of the total registered projects, 2,056 projects registered before May 1, 2017 fall under the ongoing category. The remaining 1,414 projects are classified as new projects. Notably, 52% of these projects (1,069) are situated in eight districts within the National Capital Region (NCR), including Gautam Budh Nagar, Ghaziabad, Meerut, and Hapur. The remaining 48% (987) of ongoing projects are located in 67 non-NCR districts, with Lucknow housing 399 of these projects. All projects registered before May 1, 2017 have been categorized as ongoing projects.
Among the 1,414 new projects, 37% (530) are located in the NCR, while the remaining 63% (884) are in non-NCR areas. Many of these new projects are sprouting up in cities like Jhansi, Bareilly, Moradabad, Agra, Mathura, and Vrindavan.