“Better Abolish This Institution”: Why Homebuyers Have Come to Believe RERA Works for Promoters
A practitioner’s case for a complete overhaul of the real estate regulatory architecture

An analysis of the growing concerns over RERA’s effectiveness in protecting homebuyers, examining delays, faceless hearings, weak enforcement, Section 13 non-compliance, regulatory composition, and the reforms needed to rebuild RERA as an effective consumer-protection mechanism.

Introduction: When the Chief Justice loses patience

On 12 February 2026, the Supreme Court of India said aloud what lakhs of homebuyers have been muttering in the corridors of Real Estate Regulatory Authorities (RERA) across the country. Hearing a matter arising out of the relocation of the Himachal Pradesh RERA office, a Bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi observed that homebuyers today stand completely depressed, disgusted, and disappointed, and that except facilitating builders in default, the institution is doing nothing — “better abolish this institution, we don’t mind that.”¹ The Bench went further, remarking that it is high time all States revisit and rethink the very decision to constitute these authorities, and that RERA in every State has become a “rehabilitation centre” for retired bureaucrats.²

These are not the intemperate words of a disappointed litigant. They are the considered anguish of the highest court of the land, and they cannot be taken lightly. When the Chief Justice of India suggests that a statutory regulator created specifically to protect consumers may as well be abolished because it protects the very persons it was meant to regulate, the time for polite institutional criticism is over. What is required is a candid diagnosis and a complete overhaul.

The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 was enacted with a noble legislative purpose: to bring transparency and accountability to a sector notorious for one-sided contracts, diverted funds and endlessly delayed possession, and to give the homebuyer — the weakest party in the transaction — a speedy, specialised and inexpensive forum. A decade later, the homebuyer who approaches RERA discovers something bewildering: the moment a complaint is filed, it is often the builder who relaxes. The forum meant to be the buyer’s shield is perceived, with growing justification, as the promoter’s umbrella. This article examines why that perception has taken root, and what must be done to reverse it.

The infrastructure deficit: A faceless regulator

Justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. In several State authorities, it can no longer even be seen in the literal sense.

Consider the manner in which hearings are conducted before certain Regulatory Authorities, of which the Uttar Pradesh experience is illustrative. No party can appear physically before the authority. Every hearing takes place online — and that too through a unique system in which the Presiding Officer is not visible on the screen. Counsel argues the case into a void; only the disembodied voice of the presiding member is audible. The advocate cannot see whether the Bench is attentive, whether a submission has registered, or whether a document has been taken on record. The homebuyer, who may have staked his life’s savings on the outcome, never once sets eyes on the person deciding his fate.

Let it be stated clearly: online hearings are a welcome facility. The pandemic taught the Indian judicial system the value of virtual courts, and no one suggests turning the clock back. But virtual hearing was always conceived as an option, supplementing — never supplanting — the open physical court. The Supreme Court’s e-Committee framework, and indeed the practice of every Constitutional Court in the country, proceeds on the footing that hybrid hearing is the norm: a litigant or counsel who wishes to appear physically must be able to do so. A regulator that has made no arrangement whatsoever for physical hearing, and that conducts audio-only proceedings before an invisible adjudicator, has departed from the basic architecture of open justice. An unseen tribunal is, functionally, a faceless tribunal — and faceless adjudication of high-stakes consumer disputes corrodes public confidence faster than delay itself.

The contrast within the same statutory scheme is telling. The Real Estate Appellate Tribunal takes up matters physically and functions like any other court — with a dais, an open courtroom, oral arguments addressed to a visible Bench, and the ordinary discipline of court proceedings. If proper courtroom infrastructure is essential and achievable for the appellate body, what justification can there be for denying it to the forum of first instance, where the overwhelming majority of homebuyers’ disputes begin and end? Why this step-motherly treatment of the authority that carries the real caseload? What is the benefit of providing proper infrastructure only at the appellate stage, when the ordinary homebuyer — for whom an appeal means the further burden of the pre-deposit under Section 43(5)³ and years of additional wait — may never reach it?

Proper infrastructure is not a luxury; it is a precondition for the functioning of any court or tribunal. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasised, from Union of India v. Madras Bar Assn.⁴ to Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank Ltd.⁵, that tribunals which substitute for courts must possess the trappings and independence of courts. A regulator exercising the power to cancel registrations, direct refunds with interest, and set in motion proceedings that can send a promoter to jail cannot operate out of the institutional equivalent of a call centre.

The death of the statutory timeline

The Act’s promise of speed has collapsed entirely. Section 29(4) obliges the authority to dispose of applications as expeditiously as possible and, as far as practicable, within sixty days; Section 71(2) casts the same sixty-day mandate on the adjudicating officer deciding compensation claims, requiring reasons to be recorded in writing if the period is exceeded.⁶ Parliament chose sixty days deliberately — the entire raison d’être of a specialised regulator, as against the civil court, was speed.

The ground reality mocks the statute. It would be a rare case indeed — the rarest of the rare — that has actually been decided within the statutory timeline of two months. In ordinary course, a RERA complaint takes a minimum of three to five years to attain finality, once adjournments, non-appearance of promoters, repeated “compliance” listings and the long twilight of execution proceedings are accounted for. A sixty-day statute delivering five-year justice is not merely inefficient; it is a breach of legislative trust. And every year of delay operates asymmetrically: the promoter retains and deploys the buyer’s money throughout, while the buyer simultaneously pays EMI and rent. Delay before RERA is not neutral — it is itself a transfer of wealth from the homebuyer to the defaulting builder. This, more than anything else, explains why the builder relaxes when a complaint is filed: he knows that time is on his side, and the forum has shown no capacity to take it away from him.

Section 13: A dead letter at the root of the disease

Much of the litigation that floods RERA is traceable to a single, systematically ignored provision. Section 13(1) of the Act prohibits a promoter from accepting more than ten per cent of the cost of the apartment, plot or building as advance or application fee without first entering into a written agreement for sale — and mandates that the said agreement shall be registered under the Registration Act, 1908.⁷ Section 13(2) read with the Rules prescribes the contents of that agreement so that the buyer’s rights are crystallised at the threshold.

In reality, registration of the builder-buyer agreement (BBA)/agreement for sale happens only in the rarest of rare cases. The prevailing market practice remains an unregistered, unilateral, printed-form BBA drafted entirely by the promoter, executed after substantial sums — often far in excess of the ten per cent ceiling — have already changed hands. The consequences cascade through the entire dispute pyramid: the buyer holds a document of doubtful evidentiary sanctity; the promised specifications, penalty clauses and possession date rest on paper the promoter controls; stamp duty is evaded; and when the dispute reaches RERA, the very foundation of the claim is contested. A mandatory statutory provision that is honoured in one transaction out of hundreds is not a regulation; it is an alibi.

No authority in the country has treated systematic non-compliance with Section 13 as the regulatory emergency it is. No promoter’s registration has been imperilled for running a business model built on unregistered agreements. The regulator’s silence on this front, more than any single adverse order, tells the homebuyer whose side the system is on.

The enforcement paradox: Teeth on paper, gums in practice

Here lies the cruellest irony. On paper, RERA is among the most formidable tribunals in India. Section 59(2) prescribes imprisonment of up to three years for a promoter who fails to comply with orders relating to registration; Section 63 imposes a daily penalty, cumulatively up to five per cent of the project cost, for non-compliance with orders of the authority; Section 64 prescribes imprisonment of up to three years for non-compliance with orders of the Appellate Tribunal; and Section 40(1) permits recovery of refund and interest as arrears of land revenue.⁸ Few consumer-facing statutes anywhere arm an adjudicator with the power to send the defaulter to jail for disobedience of its orders.

Yet, ask any homebuyer holding a three-year-old refund order : The recovery certificate gathers dust with the district administration; the promoter’s assets are never traced or attached; prosecution under Sections 59—64 is virtually unheard of; and the “compliance” board of the authority becomes a second round of litigation longer than the first. A tribunal whose strongest weapons have never left the armoury will not be feared by those it regulates — and a regulator that is not feared by the regulated will inevitably be seen as their friend. An order that cannot be executed is not justice; it is a souvenir.

Composition: The “Rehabilitation Centre” problem

The Supreme Court’s sharpest barb — that RERA has become a rehabilitation centre for retired officers — goes to the composition of the authorities. The Act permits, and the States have exploited, the appointment of retired bureaucrats to bodies exercising essentially adjudicatory functions over intricate questions of contract, limitation, interest, insolvency interface and execution. The constitutional jurisprudence on tribunals, from R. Gandhi through Madras Bar Assn.⁹, insists that adjudicatory bodies must be manned predominantly by persons of judicial training and must be independent of the executive that appoints them. When the State Government is simultaneously the appointing authority, the largest landowner, the planning sanctioning authority and — through its development authorities — often a defaulting promoter itself, the appointment of its own retired officers to RERA presents a conflict that no homebuyer can be expected to overlook.

The reform agenda: What a complete overhaul must contain

Abolition, as the Bench itself ultimately acknowledged, is not the answer; a homebuyer relegated back to the civil court would be worse off still. The answer is reconstruction. The following measures, some legislative and some administrative, are the minimum content of a genuine overhaul.

1. Compulsory registration within fifteen days of any booking amount.— The statute should be amended to provide that if a promoter accepts any advance money at the time of booking — not merely amounts above ten per cent — a registered Agreement for Sale in the statutory model form must follow within a maximum of fifteen days, failing which the booking amount becomes refundable forthwith with penal interest, and the acceptance itself becomes an offence. This single amendment would prevent more disputes than the authorities presently decide in a year.

2. Infrastructure parity with the Appellate Tribunal.— Every State authority must be provided proper courtroom infrastructure — open courtrooms, cause lists, daily orders uploaded the same day, and hybrid hearing in which physical appearance is a matter of right and virtual appearance an option. Audio-only proceedings before an invisible Presiding Officer must end immediately; if a hearing is virtual, the Bench must be visible on camera, as in every Constitutional Court in the country.

3. Enforcement of the sixty-day mandate.— The timeline under Sections 29(4) and 71(2) must be made meaningful: reasons for exceeding sixty days should be recorded in every case and published; pendency and disposal data of each member should be placed in the public domain; and a case pending beyond a fixed outer limit should stand transferred to a designated fast-track bench.

4. An execution machinery of its own.— Recovery under Section 40 must be taken out of the discretionary charity of the district administration. RERA should have dedicated Recovery Officers with powers of attachment and sale on the pattern of the Recovery Officers under the Recovery of Debts and Bankruptcy Act, 1993 (RDB Act), and wilful non-compliance should invite prosecution under Sections 59—64 as a matter of course, not as a theoretical possibility.

5. Judicialisation of composition.— At least one member of every adjudicating Bench should be a person who has held judicial office, and appointments should be routed through a Selection Committee headed by a serving judicial figure — the settled prescription of the tribunal jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.

6. A central performance framework.— A national dashboard tracking pendency, disposal within timeline, and — critically — compliance with final orders, State by State, would convert the present opacity into accountability.

Conclusion

The homebuyer’s disillusionment with RERA is not cynicism; it is experience. He has seen a forum where he cannot appear in person and cannot see his Judge, while the appellate body above it functions as a proper court. He has seen a sixty-day statute deliver five-year litigation. He has seen a mandatory registration provision reduced to a dead letter, and jail-backed enforcement powers that have never disturbed a single defaulter’s sleep. When he concludes that RERA exists to help promoters, he is not being unfair to the institution; the institution has been unfair to him.

The Supreme Court’s warning of February 2026 should be read not as a call for demolition but as a final notice for reconstruction. The legislative idea of 2016 remains sound; it is the implementation that has been captured, starved and hollowed out. Parliament and the States now face a simple choice: rebuild RERA into the homebuyer’s court it was meant to be, or watch the highest court’s rhetorical question — why not abolish it? — harden into the public’s settled verdict. For the sake of the millions who have entrusted their life savings to this sector, the overhaul must begin now, and it must be complete.