The Odisha Real Estate Regulatory Authority opened suo motu proceedings against Bhawani Construction Pvt. Ltd., a developer, and when the company did not show up to answer the allegations, ORERA pressed ahead without it. By an order dated 14 July 2023, it imposed a penalty of Rs 7 lakh on the company for whatever regulatory default the suo motu proceedings had identified. Bhawani Construction appealed to the Odisha Real Estate Appellate Tribunal, and its central argument had nothing to do with the merits of what it had or had not done wrong. It said it never received the notice that started the whole proceeding.
ORERA had sent its notice to "Plot No. 59/C, Jayadurga Nagar, Bhubaneswar, Khurda", an address the company said was never its own, at any point. It had not moved there, registered there, or operated from there. The company only learned of the ex parte penalty after the fact, by which time the proceeding had already run its full course without a single submission from the very party it was penalising.
Before the Tribunal, ORERA did not try to defend the address or argue that the company had somehow dodged valid service. It fairly submitted that notice had been issued to the wrong address, a concession that settled the factual dispute at the outset and left the Tribunal to work out only what followed from it.
What followed, the Tribunal held, was that the entire ex parte proceeding fell foul of natural justice. Audi alteram partem, the principle that no one should be condemned without a hearing, is not a formality to be ticked off by sending some notice somewhere; it requires that the notice actually reach the party in a position to respond to it. A notice sent to an address that was never the company's cannot be said to have given it any real opportunity to appear and defend itself, whatever box the department ticked on its own file to record that notice had gone out.
The Tribunal grounded this in the statutory framework governing its own procedure, noting that Section 53(1) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 frees the Appellate Tribunal from strict adherence to the Code of Civil Procedure but still binds it to the principles of natural justice, which it described as the sine qua non of any proceeding that affects a party's rights. The right to be heard, the order held, is an essential condition precedent for effective adjudication of the dispute, not a discretionary courtesy a regulator can dispense with by sending notice to any address on file and treating the obligation as discharged.
On that basis, the Tribunal set aside ORERA's Rs 7 lakh penalty in full and held that Bhawani Construction is legally entitled to a reasonable opportunity of hearing before ORERA, pointing to a fresh hearing on the underlying allegations once a notice capable of actually reaching the company is properly served at an address it has genuinely occupied.
The ruling is a reminder, directed as much at regulators as at the developers they oversee, that service of notice is not a bureaucratic checkbox that can be satisfied with whatever address happens to sit in a department's records. Real estate regulators across states run large caseloads of suo motu and complaint-driven proceedings against developers, often moving quickly to ex parte orders when a party does not respond, and this order signals that an ex parte penalty built on defective service carries no weight regardless of the substantive merits that might otherwise support it. Developers facing a penalty they never had a chance to contest have a straightforward, fact-specific route to challenge it: show the notice did not reach them through any fault of their own, and the natural justice defect alone can unwind the entire order.