“Better Abolish This Institution”: Why Homebuyers Have Come to Believe RERA Works for PromotersA 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 ceil