Jan Vishwas and the wrong end of RERA

On May 7, 2026, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) notified the commencement of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act provisions of the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2026. The amendment substitutes Section 68 of RERA.

In place of imprisonment up to one year plus a cumulative fine of up to ten per cent of property cost, an allottee who defies an Appellate Tribunal order is now liable only to a monetary penalty of up to ten per cent. Imprisonment is gone.

This is a small change presented as a relief to homebuyers. It is being read that way in the news coverage and in the Ministry’s framing. The framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete to the point of being misleading. The amendment removes a liability that homebuyers, in nearly nine years of RERA enforcement, have not actually faced. What it leaves behind is the part of the statute that has failed them.

Section 68 of RERA, in its pre-amendment form, punished an allottee who failed to comply with orders of the Appellate Tribunal. Section 64 punishes a promoter for the same default with up to three years' imprisonment. Section 66 punishes a real estate agent with up to one year in prison. Section 68 completed the set by extending the same logic to the allottee.

But symmetry on paper does not produce symmetry in practice. The Appellate Tribunal under Section 43 of RERA hears appeals from orders of the Regulatory Authority and the Adjudicating Officer. The vast majority of those orders are passed in proceedings instituted by allottees against developers, on grounds covered by Sections 12, 14, 18 and 19: false project disclosures, deviation from sanctioned plans, refund and interest for delayed possession, and failure to deliver. The allottee is the complainant. The developer is the respondent.

The structurally limited situation in which an allottee could be on the wrong end of a Tribunal order is narrow. A developer obtains an order from the Authority directing the allottee to perform some obligation, take possession after a delay penalty, sign a deed, pay overdue instalments. The allottee appeals. The Tribunal upholds the order. The allottee then refuses to comply. Only then does Section 68 in its earlier form even arise.

That sequence has produced no reported case of an allottee being imprisoned under Section 68 in nine years. There is no judgment, no compounding order, no prosecution traceable in the RERA case digests maintained by IBC Laws. The MoHUA’s own RERA Status Tracker, updated through September 2025, records 1.47 lakh complaints disposed nationally, with no separately reported instance of Section 68 prosecution.

Even where the provision could in theory bite, Section 70 of RERA permits compounding of any imprisonment by the court on payment of a sum capped at the maximum fine. The criminal penalty under Section 68 was always convertible to money. The amendment formalises a position the statute already permitted by other means.

The point is not that the amendment is wrong. The point is that it is doing very little.

The provisions of RERA that punish developer non-compliance carry sharper teeth on paper than Section 68 ever did. Section 63 attaches a daily monetary penalty of up to five per cent of project cost where a promoter defies an Authority’s direction. Section 64 attaches imprisonment up to three years, fine up to ten per cent of project cost, or both, where the promoter defies the Tribunal. Sections 59(2) and 63 extend similar liability to non-registration and other contraventions.

These provisions have produced almost no criminal convictions either. The Jan Vishwas 2026 Bill text, available through PRS, confirms that Sections 63 and 64 remain untouched. Neither does Section 66 covering real estate agents or Section 67 covering allottee non-compliance with Authority orders, which never carried imprisonment in the first place.

If imprisonment under Section 68 produced no prosecutions because the structural situation rarely arose, imprisonment under Section 64 has produced none for a different reason. State authorities almost never reach for criminal prosecution. They reach for execution under Section 40 of the Act, which permits recovery of unpaid penalties, interest, or compensation as arrears of land revenue, channelled through the district magistrate’s revenue machinery. The buyer’s grievance, in practice, is not that the developer was not jailed. It is that the recovery certificate, once issued, sits with the collector for months or years before yielding anything.

The shape of the enforcement crisis is visible in the rare cases that escape the standard channel. In November 2022, the Gurugram RERA Adjudicating Officer sentenced a developer’s director to 60 days civil imprisonment for failure to comply with a refund order of about ₹27 lakh against ILD Millennium. The route was not Section 64. It was civil detention ordered by the Adjudicating Officer after directors refused to disclose assets to satisfy the decree. The buyer had booked the unit in January 2013. Possession was due in July 2016, roughly nine years from booking to a coercive enforcement step; and the step was directed at execution of the monetary order, not at criminal prosecution of the Tribunal-level provision.

The Supreme Court itself has noticed the problem. In Mansi Brar Fernandes v. Shubha Sharma & Anr (2025), the Court held that the right to secure and timely possession of one’s home is a facet of the fundamental right to shelter under Article 21. It observed that RERA authorities should not be reduced to “toothless tigers" and directed that States must adequately staff RERA authorities, that at least one member of each authority should be a legal expert or consumer advocate with proven real-estate expertise and that the Union should undertake a consultative exercise to bring uniformity to State RERA Rules. The directive is procedural and institutional. It addresses an enforcement gap that no amendment to Section 68 will close.

This is not a hidden problem. The Forum for People’s Collective Efforts, the homebuyer organisation that participated in the framing of RERA and continues to engage with the Central Advisory Council, has repeatedly made the same point in public: the buyer who wins a RERA order then has to fight a separate battle to enforce it. The criminal provisions against developers exist on paper. They are not used in practice. The buyer’s actual remedy is the recovery certificate and its weakness is the central, unresolved feature of the regime.

The Jan Vishwas 2026 Act amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts, of which 717 are decriminalised. The stated rationale is ease of doing business and trust-based governance. The Select Committee chaired by Tejasvi Surya recommended expansion of the decriminalisation framework first introduced by the Jan Vishwas Act of 2023. The pre-2023 critique of Indian regulatory law was that thousands of minor compliance offences carried imprisonment for what were essentially procedural failures by businesses. The reform is intelligible against that backdrop.

RERA does not fit the backdrop. Its criminal penalties are not the routine compliance provisions that the Jan Vishwas framework was designed to clean up. The penalty for an allottee under Section 68 was not a compliance penalty against a regulated business. It was a backstop against a homebuyer defying a final Tribunal order, in a statute whose enforcement architecture runs in one direction: against developers, in favour of buyers. To treat Section 68 as a stray instance of overcriminalisation, alongside the Drugs and Cosmetics Act and the Cattle Trespass Act, is to read RERA as a generic business regulation statute. It is not. The Preamble describes the Act as one to protect the interest of consumers in the real estate sector. The provisions track that description, with consumer-facing protections in Chapter III and developer obligations in Chapter II.

What the Jan Vishwas amendment does to RERA is small and almost entirely benign in isolation. What it signals is more troubling. The framework is reading consumer protection law through a business-compliance lens. It is making a cosmetic concession on the only consumer-facing penalty in the statute, while declining to engage with the question that nine years of enforcement have made unavoidable: why do RERA orders against developers go unenforced and what should be done about it?

There are answers to that question. Some require legislative attention. The recovery certificate route under Section 40 could be backed by dedicated execution benches or by giving State RERA authorities direct power to attach property without routing through the revenue machinery. Section 64 prosecutions could be made compoundable only after the original order has been complied with, removing the present incentive to compound first and comply never. The Tribunal-level appointment vacancies that the Supreme Court flagged in Mansi Brar Fernandes require Central direction. None of this is in the Jan Vishwas Act, because none of it would count as deregulation.

The amendment is being celebrated as a step for homebuyers. It is not a step against them. But the homebuyer who has been waiting four years for a refund order to be executed will not notice the difference. The developer who continues to ignore that order will not notice either. The only people who will notice are those drafting the next round of legislative reform, who will see in Jan Vishwas 2026 a confirmation that RERA is now classified, in policy terms, as a statute primarily about doing business rather than about housing rights. That classification, more than the substitution of one section, is what should worry anyone who has watched RERA work.

Kshitij Saruparia is a final year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at NALSAR University of Law.

Apeksha Kachhawaha is a final year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur.