‘Diluted’ RERA gets over 1,700 objections

Sushil Manav

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 23

The ‘diluted’ draft Haryana Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Rules notified by the government have received over 1,700 objections and a missive from Union Minister of State Rao Inderjit Singh to Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, asking him to re-examine it and carry out necessary modifications.

“We have received over 1,700 objections and our department is examining these. Once we are done with these, we will place these before the state government for framing final rules,” said Arun Kumar Gupta, Principal Secretary, Town and Country Planning Department.

He said though the number of communications received by the department was over 1700, the actual number of objections could be much more as there were between five and 10 objections in a single letter in several cases.

Union Minister of State for Urban Development, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Rao Inderjit Singh also took strong exception to ‘dilution’ of RERA by the government, saying it would deprive home buyers of the benefit of legislation passed by Parliament for the protection of customers.

“Any dilution of rules will not be appreciated by millions of home buyers in the state who have been waiting for long to get relief under the Act,” he said, requesting early notification of RERA rules.

He wrote that certain provisions in the draft rules were not in consonance with the letter and spirit of the original Act, citing nine rules ‘diluted’ to the detriment of home buyers and advantage of builders.

“It is a settled law that subordinate legislation cannot be in violation of the principal Act and any such provision in rules will be liable to be struck down by courts,” he pointed out in his letter.

The Town and Country Planning Department in Haryana notified draft rules under the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, on April 28 and invited claims and objections from the public by May 15.

It was being alleged that the rules had been ‘diluted’ to suit the interests of builders instead of investors by keeping almost all ongoing projects out of the purview of the rules.

Gaurav Prakash, heading the group Undiluted RERA in Gurugram, stated that the BJP government in the state was out to undo the efforts of Narendra Modi government, which had brought in a stringent law to protect home buyers, though thousands of them had been duped by builders in the state.