Venue—India Habitat Centre
Moderator—Ravi Sinha, CEO & Managing Editor, Track2Realty
Panelists—Sachin Sandhir, MD, South Asia, RICS
Achal Agarwal, ED, Investments, Fire Capital
Sunil Dahiya, MD, Vigneshwara Developers
J C Khera, GM, Finance, Supertech
Sunil Dahiya: When the meltdown of 2008 and the aftereffects of 2009 rolled in, see the amount of letters sent by developers to the customers and the customer calling back and telling that ‘sorry boss, I am on the verge of losing my job, I don’t have the money’. Not a single developer went to any court or had any power in this judicial system to recover any payment from the consumer, there is no law. But when you have progressed the project to 50-60 per cent and you have 40 per cent consumers defaulting on payments, even forfeiting that 10 per cent deposit holds no value to you. The consumer will go to court and get a stay on the cancelation because he has the law in place for that.
All I am saying is that there is gap in policy framework that regulation needs to be on both sides.
Ravi Sinha: Do you mean to suggest that a single regulator and a single window clearance is the answer to this?
Sunil Dahiya: I think a regulator along with an ombudsman system has provided better services to the consumer. There should be an ombudsman for the consumer. Let the industry be regulated by an ombudsman and if that fails, then there is recourse to courts because we need to crush out the litigation period.
Ravi Sinha: You are inviting a Lokpal for real estate.
Sachin Sandhir: That is exactly the model in UK. There is a central act which is the consumer redressal act. It is something that the Government here is also thinking about. There has been talks going on over a separate consumer act for real estate which is within the purview of the central act. It basically sets the preamble for consumer redressal mechanism. But under that you need an ombudsman to provide certain services, which is how it should be. All the stakeholders are registered with the ombudsman or the central act and almost 90 per cent of the cases are handled at that level of the ombudsman. Very little goes to court for litigation.
Ravi Sinha: It implies that since there is no single defined regulator in realty, everyone from the local police to the CCI wants to regulate you.
Sunil Dahiya: Everyone wants to become our mai-baap, not regulator. If you go through the 40 NOCs which we get, every NOC has the end right not withstanding their ‘No’. Not withstanding their ‘No’ means they can withdraw it any time. Suppose some other act is imposed which is in contradiction with one of the NOCs, there will be no argument to counter that cancelation. It is only our interpretation that we have the permission. But there is no permission, it is just an NOC.
..…to be continued
