The recent Punjab & Haryana High Court's ruling, bringing housing societies under the ambit of RTI, empowers homebuyers with regard to the management of their society affairs in a democratic, fair and transparent manner. However, beyond this judgement, there is a need to create an RTI-RERA interface at the national level to not just ensure better governance of housing societies but also help improve the efficacy of RERA.
This landmark judgement comes in the backdrop of a large number of instances of misgovernance/mismanagement by housing societies. Taking advantage of manipulated elections and secretive and autocratic style of functioning, society office bearers have been often indulging in corrupt practices of awarding questionable contracts, manipulating minutes of meetings, suppressing records including correspondence with developers and government agencies, fudging accounts, inflating maintenance charges and diverting funds. To make the matters worse, the dissent of society members is suppressed.
This judgement pertaining to RTI also becomes crucial as the Union Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) on September 4 launched a unified RERA portal. The portal serves as a single-window to collate data from state RERA authorities and store it on a national level platform. The unified RERA portal is designed to store real time, verified and reliable information pertaining to project approval, completion, handover, stalled projects, status of consumer grievances etc. The common portal is aimed at enhancing accountability and efficiency to strengthen regulatory oversight in order to streamline regulatory compliance for homebuyers and investors for improving post-possession governance.
A unified and structured RERA portal that provides a common national-level data dashboard is a good step forward in synchronizing RTI Act with Housing Societies Acts and RERA. Here, it may be mentioned that the uneven and patchy implementation of RTI Act across states (in)directly impacts the efficacy of RERA in providing relief to the aggrieved homebuyers. There is a varying degree of effectiveness in implementing RTI in different states due to lack of proper digitization and management of records. Some states have strong RTI mechanisms while others have weak systems. The poor integration between RTI and RERA further adds to the problem.
RTI Act complements RERA by aiding to tone up its functioning. RTI is an instrument to empower consumers to seek requisite information from public authorities like RERA to boost accountability in its working and promote transparency in its operations. While RTI is used to source information for the purposes of empowering consumers including property buyers and investors, RERA provides remedy/relief to aggrieved homebuyers in enforcing their rights and penalising violators.
Going forward, to ensure that this marked RTI judgement turns out to be a potent tool to safeguard the interests of property consumers and investors at the national level and provide immediate relief to them, new central model rules along with requisite amendments in cooperatives/apartments statutes, are required. There is a need to harmonise RTI state-level co-operative societies, apartment owners’ associations and RERA. The unified RERA portal can be further revamped to house the records related to RTI, RERA, housing societies, urban local bodies and urban development agencies. This will go a long way in enhancing the confidence, trust and overall sentiment of property consumers and investors and in turn further promoting real estate as an asset class of choice.
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