In unusually candid remarks from the bench, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant expressed sharp disappointment with how the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 is functioning on the ground in many states, suggesting it may be 'high time' states revisit their decision to constitute Real Estate Regulatory Authorities in their current form — going so far as to say the framework, as currently administered, appears to primarily benefit defaulting builders rather than the homebuyers it was designed to protect.
The criticism lands against a well-documented backdrop: RERA authorities in several states remain under-resourced, orders often go unenforced for years, and the appellate tribunal structure in a number of states is either incomplete or badly backlogged — meaning a homebuyer who obtains a favourable RERA order frequently faces as long a wait for actual recovery as they would have faced through ordinary civil litigation, defeating much of RERA's original purpose of speed and accessibility.
This is not the first time the judiciary has flagged state-level implementation gaps in RERA — reports and parliamentary standing committee reviews in the years since the Act's 2016 commencement have repeatedly noted uneven staffing, delayed constitution of appellate tribunals, and inconsistent enforcement practices across states, with some states significantly outperforming others on functional RERA infrastructure. What distinguishes the CJI's remarks is the bluntness of the framing — suggesting the current structure may be net-negative for the very class of persons it was meant to protect, rather than merely imperfect or slow — which is likely to add real pressure on state governments to prioritise RERA infrastructure investment, particularly appellate tribunal staffing, ahead of any further legislative or judicial intervention on the point.
For homebuyers and their counsel, the remarks are a reminder that a favourable RERA order is often only the first step, not the end, of a recovery process — enforcement strategy needs to be planned alongside the RERA complaint itself, including tracking whether the relevant state's appellate machinery is actually functional before assuming a straightforward path from complaint to compensation. For developers, the comments signal that the judiciary's patience with structural RERA implementation failures at the state level is wearing thin, and stronger enforcement mechanisms — potentially including closer judicial monitoring of state-level RERA functioning — may well follow in subsequent proceedings.