Supreme Court Orders GNIDA To Assist Homebuyers Reviving Dead Project: Report

The Supreme Court has ordered the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority (GNIDA) to assist homebuyers in reviving an abandoned housing project. The directive includes providing details on financial demands that would have been imposed had the original developer completed the project, enabling a proportional distribution of charges based on apartment sizes, as per a report by NDTV.

The project stalled after a cooperative housing society, which had leased land from the Authority, failed to meet financial obligations despite collecting payments from homebuyers. A bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta criticized the Authority’s lack of cooperation in efforts to restart the development, the report added.

“We are not happy with the fact that the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority is not cooperating in the entire exercise of reviving a dead project where the homebuyers have been cheated by the builder who vanished decades ago,” the Court stated, as quoted by the media report.

Senior Advocate Ravindra Kumar, representing the Authority, sought a week’s time to furnish the required financial details.

The disputed project was initiated by Golf Course Sahakari Awas Samiti Ltd., which secured a land allotment from the Authority in 2004 for Plot No. 7, Sector Pi-2, Greater Noida. Homebuyers later accused the society of colluding with financial institutions, halting payments to the Authority while continuing to collect funds from buyers, many of whom had taken bank loans for their flats, the report added.

Initially, homebuyers challenged the Authority’s 2011 decision to terminate the lease in the Allahabad High Court. The court later upheld the termination in 2016, citing the society’s failure to clear dues. Dissatisfied with the ruling, homebuyers escalated the case to the Supreme Court, as per the report.

In a separate development, the Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to draft a roadmap for probing an alleged “builder-bank nexus” that has impacted thousands of homebuyers in the National Capital Region (NCR), the report added.

A bench of Justices Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh acknowledged that homebuyers were affected by subvention schemes where banks disbursed around 60 per cent to 70 per cent of home loan amounts directly to builders, even when projects remained incomplete. Under these schemes, developers were held liable for paying EMIs until the flats were delivered. However, when builders defaulted, banks shifted the burden onto homebuyers, as per the report.

Buy Outlook Money March 2025 Magazine Issue on Amazon Here.