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Guest Column: Tricity apartments and blissful ignorance of RERA provisions
All one-sided conditions are unilaterally jettisoned in very such adhesion agreements that would otherwise not stand judicial scrutiny
The lesson to be learnt from the recent Supreme Court judgement striking down apartmentalisation in Corbusian Chandigarh is that there should be no further administrative apathy and state-run regulatory arbitrage in the high-rise buildings that are mushrooming so fast in the tricity area.
Otherwise, this spiralling trajectory northwards without compliance of proper checks and balances as also compliances of The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, will be another Frankenstein’s monster swallowing the peripheral cusp of Chandigarh. Down the line, the Corbusian Chandigarh would be reduced to a severely clogged crucible. The climate change question: whether in the time to come this red line area would be more lethal than Radcliffe’s line.
Ample case law abounds handed down by the Supreme Court of India and the Competition Commission of India imposing severe financial penalties on excesses routinely deployed even by so-called builders of repute.
Sadly enough, building companies in the tricity have a free run on lack of meaningful government accountability. Self-certification by architects for commercial projects is fraught with grave dangers. To add to that, allottees alone are further severely penalised with unchecked hugely extortionate opaque pricing mechanisms.
Purely out of no choice allottees are pressured to sign one-sided adhesion agreements pitched by high decibel sales campaigns. Truth lashes out at the end of the journey when it is too late. Not many people have the time and resources to initiate legal proceedings.
It is the right of the customer to demand any project-related information from realtors. All one-sided conditions are unilaterally jettisoned in very such adhesion agreements that would otherwise not stand judicial scrutiny. Polite grievance requests in person to builders only invite opprobrium. In this backdrop, the article addresses some of the most significant issues relating to real estate transactions.
To catalogue: first and foremost the project should be RERA-registered. Whether the project is being built on shamlat land, or any land acquisition and/or any legal proceeding are pending at all. Rate per square foot area and preferential location charges are very important benchmarks that are constantly manipulated.
Allottees should not sign blank forms. Especially the measurements and pricing mechanism columns are parachuted subsequently very clandestinely without consent of purchasers.
Illustrative drawings with regard to carpet area measurements unleashed in the unchecked electronic ads and glossy brochures are delightfully vague and misleading.
A big bone of contention in the case of apartments is the carpet area, which, otherwise, is very succinctly defined under the RERA legislation. But builders besides using superfluous terminology also camouflage all common areas to be wrongly included in the carpet area. Motive is to illegally inflate the area, and thus the price.
So what’s the solution to calculate the exact carpet area? Architects will advise you “only DWG drawings”, and not illustrative drawings can actually independently help calculate area measurements. Project layout and zoning plans can also be obtained under the provisions of RTI from the office of director town and country planning.
RERA-approved apartments technically are meant to be escalation-free beyond a minuscule increase in carpet area of the apartment at the time of possession. It is not unusual for there to be yet a further exponential increase in price at the time of handing over the apartment on the pretext of fine print that measurements of the apartment will be calculated at the time of possession.
Most recently, there have been illegal demands, rather directives, by some building companies in New Chandigarh to deposit stamp duty and registration charges in the Punjab Government treasury in advance of the possession of the property — even where the full agreed sale price has been paid by the allottee to the building company.
Post RERA 2016, club charges are not mandatory. Compulsory club memberships mandatorily renewable cannot be fastened upon allottees which generally run into lakhs.
Pre-RERA 2016 builders would slam allottees with instant cancellation for raising awkward questions that are now legally impermissible.
In the penultimate analysis, in the event of any such glaring discrepancies not being addressed, the best option is to invoke the jurisdiction of RERA at the earliest possible, but only post-registration of the sale agreement that makes allotment and sale legally definitive.
ranjitmalhotra1966@gmail.com
(The author is a Chandigarh based lawyer and a Felix Scholar.)
