Unending wait for own house snuffs out a buyer’s life

For lakhs of aggrieved homebuyers across the country, the wait for a roof over the head has become an endless nightmare.  Tragically, financial hardships, mental, emotional trauma, and depression arising out of the non-delivery of stuck real estate projects have started taking their toll, cutting short the lives of many buyers. In a recent instance, a senior citizen who had invested his lifetime savings in Antriksh Sanskriti, a project of Antriksh Realtech Pvt Ltd, could not bear the stress and harassment caused by uncertainty continuing over the project completion for more than last eight years. In early June, his health condition deteriorated and he died with the dream of living in his own house remaining unfulfilled in his heart.

Antriksh Group, headed by Rakesh Yadav, had launched Antriksh Sanskriti project located on NH-24, Ghaziabad in 2010-11 with the Builder-Buyer Agreement stipulating the project handover to homebuyers by 2014 but till date the delivery of flats is nowhere in sight. Harassed homebuyers of this project who have paid 90-95% of total committed value of the flats have been fighting a prolonged battle for possession of their flats at multiple forums like NCDRC and UP RERA, but with no tangible results so far.

Rekha Pal Shah, a homebuyer who had booked a 2BHK flat in D bloc of this project, said, “The Narendra Modi government should live up to the expectations of the homebuyers otherwise the system’s insensitivity will snatch away the lives of many fellow buyers among us, and such phenomena will not at all be auspicious for the second term of Narendra Modi government. In such a scenario, NaMo’s ambitious Housing For All initiative shall always remain a distant dream.”

Anand Priyadarshi, another homebuyer who booked a flat in this project in 2012-13said, “It seems there is no end in sight for our ordeal. We are victims of sheer cheating, forgery and concealment of the project’s actual information by the Builder. When we booked our flats in 2010-11, the Builder did not disclose that that the land of the project is not owned by his company but by Raksha Vigyan Samiti (RVS), a co-operative housing society, against which GDA has slapped a notice for recovery of compounding charges amounting to Rs 42 crore.”

The homebuyers under the banner of Antriksh Sanskriti Welfare Association (ASWA) had got a chargesheet registered in Vijay Nagar Police Station under sections 420 and 407 against Rakesh Yadav and two other directors of the groupsubsequent to which a case was registeredin Ghaziabad District Court but the builder managed to get a stay on the proceedings of the case from Allahabad High Court. According to Jiten Dalai, President, ASWA, “Highly influential Yadav continues to hoodwink the gullible home buyers while launching projects one after another at the same time. We are under heavy debts because of the resultant monetary burden on us for last more than eight years. The Builder has also denied to give any penal interest, and compensation for delay in possession to us even as we are forced to pay rents as well as EMIs of home loans, putting us under grave financial crisis and mental harassment that poses grave risk to our health and life.”

As lives of more than 1200 homebuyers in this over-delayed project are at stake, the moot question is whether Modi 2.0 will dispel the darkness enveloping the under-construction homes of buyers and save them from succumbing to untimely deaths?