New Delhi: “As a new Chief Justice of India takes over, all that everyone talks about is the high-profile cases pending for disposal in the Supreme Court. There is no whisper about cases involving the common man such as us,” says a beleaguered Noida-based IT professional, Ajay Kumar.
Ajay has been doing rounds of the Supreme Court since December 2018, hoping for an end to his wait to own a home. An investor in one of Unitech’s delayed housing projects in Noida—UniHome—Ajay approached the top court in 2018, seeking a refund of the flat booking money he paid in 2013. Six years later, Ajay is among the over 100 UniHome investors who remain without a home or a complete refund.
Little did they know that approaching the top court would become the start of a long ordeal. “All of us got favourable orders from the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, which directed Unitech to refund us. That was in 2018. However, Unitech has not abided by the NCDRC orders. The Supreme Court then had been issuing stern directions to the company to pay back consumers. So, we intervened in the case before it, hoping to get back our money,” says Ajay, explaining his motivation to approach the SC.
“In one of its initial orders, the court directed its registry to pay us out of the Rs 170 crore it had collected from Unitech. The payments were to be on a pro-rata basis. We got the first instalment, roughly Rs 5 to 6 lakh,” says Ajay.
That was in early 2019. Cut to 2024, and there has been little progress in unfinished Unitech projects or refunds to homebuyers.
The case’s progress in the top court is also in stark contrast with that of the Amrapali case. Amrapali began its legal journey in the court’s corridors at about the same time as Unitech. However, meticulous planning, combined with continuous judicial scrutiny and strict compliance with all deadlines, have, by now, ensured homes for Amrapali investors.
Advocate M.L. Lahoty, who represents the homebuyers in the Unitech case, draws out the distinction. “For Amrapali, the court made a concerted effort to bail out the company and prepared a framework to complete the unfinished projects. It continues to supervise the status of the ongoing projects and has given adequate time to hear the case since appointing a court receiver in July 2019,” says Lahoty, who has also appeared for homebuyers in the Amrapali case.
The court reviews in the Amrapali case helped find sources to generate surplus funds of more than Rs 10,000 crore, Lahoty says. The court also pushed the agency tasked to complete the constructions to meet a March 2025 deadline to hand over possession of flats to homebuyers, he adds.
Lahoty acknowledges that the scale of the work in Unitech projects is much larger than what has, so far, taken place in the Amrapali projects. Yet, he believes the different treatment of the two cases of a similar nature has shown varying results, with one fast-tracked and the other proceeding at a snail’s pace.
“It is a tell-tale sign of how two different benches deal with cases involving similar questions of law differently,” the lawyer added.
Unitech story
A civil appeal, which arose from a 2016 Delhi High Court order, landed the Unitech case in the Supreme Court. Responding to a petition by a group of homebuyers, a top court bench led by the then-Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, in October 2016, stayed the HC order.
The HC directed meetings between homebuyers and Unitech for approval or disapproval of any proposed compromise that would enable the company to complete pending projects and hand over flats. The HC, at the time, allowed a third party to open escrow accounts and hold funds or assets to complete delayed Unitech projects, besides staying proceedings in cases filed by Unitech homebuyers before the NCDRC.
The SC, however, set aside the HC order, saying that the execution proceedings against Unitech will continue in the NCDRC. During one of the hearings, CJI Misra verbally observed that Unitech had to refund homebuyers keen to give up their flat bookings.
The hearings in the case took a circuitous route when Unitech promoter Sanjay Chandra’s appeal for bail in a cheating case registered against him by Delhi Police landed in the Supreme Court in 2017 in a separate proceeding. As CJI Misra’s bench took up Chandra’s plea to grant him bail, which the Delhi High Court had denied him, the civil matters related to refunds to homebuyers saw little progress.
With Sanjay Chandra in jail, the court shifted its focus to making Unitech deposit money it owed homebuyers in its registry. That saw nearly Rs 200 crore coming into the court registry, with some of it released as the first instalment to homebuyers.
The SC, meanwhile, declined Chandra’s bail and initiated the recovery of more money by selling Unitech’s unencumbered properties.
In 2017, CJI Misra’s bench appointed a Justice S.N. Dhingra-led committee to supervise the sale of Unitech’s real estate assets. Three years later, a new bench led by then-judge and now-retired CJI D.Y. Chandrachud directed the constitution of a new board of directors to take over Unitech’s affairs. Subsequently, the Justice Dhingra panel was disbanded in June 2020.
During its tenure, the Justice Dhingra panel recovered nearly Rs 300 crore, which ended up in the SC registry, and also supervised the construction of a few projects for some time. Then, a fresh panel, headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice A.M. Sapre was formed in June 2022 to assist the new board of directors.
In December 2018, the Justice Chandrachud-led bench ordered a forensic audit. The report revealed that Unitech received nearly Rs 14,270 crore from 29,800 homebuyers between 2006 and 2014 and roughly Rs 1,805 crore from six financial institutions for its projects. According to the report, the company did not use Rs 5,063 crore of the homebuyers’ money and Rs 763 crore raised from financial institutions, instead making high-value investments in off-shore tax-haven countries between 2007 and 2010.
In February 2022, the Justice Chandrachud bench allowed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to rely upon the audit report for its probe against Unitech.
So far, the new board has managed to recover only Rs 1,200-1,500 crore of the siphoned money by selling Unitech’s land assets.
According to the website maintained by the new board, though tenders for construction were awarded for 71 of the 81 incomplete residential projects, the work started in only 29. Similarly, tenders were awarded for work in nine of 10 commercial sites, but work started in only eight. Records show the tenders were allotted in the last eight months.
The original plan proposed 18,786 residential units and 1,860 commercial units. Today, nearly 10,000 homebuyers are waiting for possession of flats, whereas a bulk have stuck to their demand for refunds.
As for Chandra, he is finally out on bail.
Amrapali timeline
The Amrapali case picked up pace after the Supreme Court, in July 2019, delivered a detailed judgment, laying out a framework for further construction work. Earlier, from 2017 when the case reached SC to 2019, the top court initiated several measures to tighten the screws on the firm and its directors.
In 2018, it attached Amrapali’s assets, took suo motu contempt action against its promoters and jailed them, appointed forensic auditors and sought from NBCC, a central government body, a due diligence report of the incomplete residential projects. The firm’s promoters continue to be in prison, with SC declining their pleas for release several times.
NBCC submitted its proposals for 16 incomplete Amrapali projects, with 46,000 units. The estimated cost of the proposals was Rs 8,000 crore. With the court’s approval, NBCC prepared detailed project reports between December 2018 and March 2019.
The forensic audit report of eight volumes, which revealed the diversion of over Rs 5,000 crore by Amarapali and its shell companies, was submitted to the court. Then, on 23 July 2019, a bench led by Justice Arun Mishra (retired) appointed R. Venkataramani as a court receiver and formally appointed the NBCC to construct the flats.
The judgment found Noida and Greater Noida to be hand-in-gloves with Amrapali and restrained them from claiming dues until the handover of the residential units.
Between July 2019 and March 2020, NBCC first issued tenders for the projects where homebuyers were already residing, and work was required for their limited habitability. Though COVID-19 stalled the work at these sites, the court did not stop its monitoring.
After Justice Mishra’s retirement in September 2020, a new bench led by Justice U.U. Lalit, who later became the CJI, held regular hearings and online sessions, which helped NBCC raise nearly Rs 2,150 crore.
As the lockdown period began to ease in phases, NBCC initiated its work and completed the first two projects it undertook by June 2021. For the remaining, it awarded contracts for major construction work.
From June 2021, construction at all 16 sites started in full swing. Simultaneously, the handing over of possession began. In June this year, NBCC sold off an unsold inventory of 5,229 flats and 1,200 premises of those who defaulted in loan repayments, earning Rs 3,669 crore. That enabled the agency to close its loan partially.
Finally, in July this year, the court permitted NBCC to purchase an additional floor area ratio (FAR) to construct approximately 4,000 more units and generate surplus funds worth more than Rs 10,000 crore. The extra units, the SC said, could be built after NBCC completed the original units and handed over their possession.
Also read: State-run NBCC coming up with 13,000 apartments at Amrapali’s vacant plots in Greater Noida
Where Unitech got stuck
Top court advocate Pawan Sree Aggarwal, who is assisting the SC bench as an amicus curiae in the Unitech case, told ThePrint that with the new board of directors in place since January 2020, the “progress seems to be marred with several hiccups”.
“SC took a marked step to consider the predicament of homebuyers when it entertained petitions filed against Unitech, Amrapali, and Jaypee Infrastructure. The three cases have taken different courses of resolution. The Jaypee case was resolved under the insolvency law. In the Amrapali case, the court vested all properties to the court administrator, under whose supervision the construction work maintained a steady pace. However, in the Unitech case, the work went to the new board,” he says.
According to Ajay, Unitech hearings got complicated when the court merged all the petitions related to the company into one case. “Once that happened, nobody was heard. The financial creditors took over, investors who had fixed deposits in the company got added to the case, and they got priority for refunds. Homebuyers were left far behind in the line,” he adds.
Amarnath Ghosh, an investor in Unitech’s Sunbreeze project in Gurgaon, feels the bench hearing the Amrapali case had more “vision”.
“A well-established agency project manager was appointed, effective hearings took place in the case, and there was a court receiver who helped NBCC streamline a lot of work,” he says.
On the other hand, technical delays and glitches have been bogging down the Unitech case since the beginning. The flat booking money was and continues to be spent on activities other than construction.
“Project managers appointed earlier by the court got sacked. Time went into getting a validation certificate of the existing building’s structural strength. We also feel the committee under the retired SC judge is a bottleneck. The new board has to go before it for every approval and, in case of a refusal, has to seek the court’s permission each time,” Ghosh says.
No effective hearing after December 2023, except one
The dispute over how much Unitech owed Noida and Greater Noida is another factor behind the delay in the case. While the two authorities claimed Rs 9,000 crore, the new board of directors has calculated it to be roughly Rs 500 crore.
When the board of directors suggested a renewal of the layout plans for building additional units with an increased FAR, Noida and Greater Noida opposed it, demanding a fresh assessment of the projects.
It was only in April 2024 when the issue was resolved, with the CJI Chandrachud-led bench arranging for an amicable arrangement. It asked the board of directors to apply for clearances with the two authorities for the units Unitech wants to construct now.
Lahoty points out another area of concern—a lack of funds. “Rs 600 crore is lying with the SC registry, but the new board can not withdraw it. It is to pay homebuyers who got favourable court orders for refunds. Also, there are those with fixed deposits with the company, besides firm employees who have been demanding their dues too,” the counsel explains.
The new board submitted a plea in 2022 seeking the release of Rs 200 crore from the corpus lying with the court, but there has since been no movement.
Eventually, due to rising construction costs, homebuyers who opted for refunds have been told to modify their choice and go for possession of their flats.
“But with no plan or proposal in place, how can we accept it?” says Ajay, who, on his lawyer’s advice, has agreed to conditional possession. “I will give a final approval only when there is a final plan in hand,” he says. “There has been no hearing to discuss the resolution plan proposed by the new board of directors.”
SC’s last effective order in the case was in December 2023, when it permitted the new board to issue tenders for construction work. After that, the case was listed more than a dozen times but never taken up for hearing.
“The matter was listed several times before CJI Chandrachud’s bench, even when he was close to his retirement date. But, he never took it up despite our mentioning it,” said Lahoty.
According to Ghosh, the new board of directors started on an unsure note—80 percent of its members resigned soon after its constitution. Moreover, the members are not stationed in Delhi and have to travel to Delhi each time for a meeting, with the expenses coming from the company’s shallow pockets.
“Moreover, there were gaps in the board’s handling of the projects. It had not envisaged that pollution control approvals had expired. After several months, it learnt about it and had to apply afresh for environmental clearance,” Ghosh said.
Though work has commenced on some sites, the pace does not inspire confidence in the investors about receiving their flats anytime soon.
“I am very hopeful that we will get possession of our homes, but it looks unlikely that it will happen in 2025—the target date Unitech fixed to make the deliveries,” Ghosh said.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
Also read: Bank loans to higher floor-area ratio, how state-run NBCC plans to complete stuck Amrapali projects
Well put out the plight of Unitech home buyers. Feel the government or the SC focus on celebrity cases and whichever increases their trp rating sadly. Feel with lot of pain that not working on a decent solution for common people like us!
Had this not been taken to SC, atleast buyers were entitled for delay compensation. Now, things have gone more worse and feel like it’s going in my way or high way direction. Feel people are forced to be patient and we have to accept to whatever they tell even if no delay compensation – that have made us think atleast if we get something (a home, that too even without full quality, without delay compensation or lost interest,…..) that’s more than enough. Feel terribly stuck!