In 2007, Preeti Banerjee bought a house in the outskirts of New Delhi and hoped to live her dreams. However, the agony of an average middle-class home buyer often left at the mercy of builders turned the entire process of owning a house into a nightmare. What makes the story of this television producer newsworthy is the stark reality of how in the absence of regulations, real estate companies that flourished in the NCR region over the last one decade have made a fortune with the hard-earned money people like Banerjee.

The dream of the average middle-class family to own one’s own house has, of late, become a nightmare. Delayed possession, faults in design and construction parameters, mismatch of space in the guise of floor area and carpet area... the list of woes for home buyers seems to be endless. In the absence of any prescribed guidelines, developers are often found collecting funds from the bookings in one project and diverting it to either purchase more land or kick start another project. The biggest investment of one’s lifetime, that of a home, is more often than not ends up in a legal battle. The number of cases brought forward in consumer courts by aggrieved home buyers has skyrocketed of late.

In some cases, real estate companies have scrapped their projects even after receiving hundreds of bookings. All this clearly illustrates the absence of regulation in the realty sector and goes to show how developers take home buyers for a ride. The moot point here is whether there is any grievance redressal mechanism in the system to protect the hard-earned money of home buyers? After all, buying a house is the biggest investment that one makes in life. Unfortunately, there are very few who are lucky to know the feeling of actually owning a house.

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