The Supreme Court has asked the Gurugram district administration and Chintels India Private Ltd, the builder of the Paradiso project, where a higher story of Tower D had collapsed onto lower floors in February 2022 killing two women, to file a reply in two weeks’ time in response to affected residents’ grievance regarding non-payment of compensatory rent by the developer since March 2023.
However, the date for the next hearing was not announced. The order is yet to be uploaded on the Supreme Court website.
Senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, arguing for the affected residents of Chintels Paradiso before the bench of justices Hrishikesh Roy and Pankaj Mithal, said that following an Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi report, Towers E and F were also declared unsafe and the district administration had asked residents to move out. The builder had been giving the rentals to people who had to find alternative accommodation but had allegedly stopped doing so since March 2023.
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Bhushan argued that Chintels India said that instead of paying the rent, it will offer two options. One is compensation or in effect a buyback offer at the rate of Rs 6,500 per square foot of the flat that they owned in the Paradiso project. The other option is to await the result of an independent audit by the Central Building Research Institute, and if it finds the buildings unsafe, the developer will demolish and reconstruct the towers.
“… thereafter (builder will) take 36 months to reconstruct the buildings and till that time resident will not get rents. Now the district magistrate has also asked residents to move out without any provision for paying rent. These are middle-class people who have put in all their savings and took loans to buy these flats. So at least in the meantime, the builder must pay rent to these people,” Bhushan said in the apex court.
“The State is granted two weeks’ time to file a response on the projection made by the petitioners that although the occupiers of the flats have been asked to move out, the rental was ordered to be paid. Although the rental was being paid by the builder until March 2023 the same has stopped since then. An appropriate response within the same timeframe may also be filed by the builder,” Roy said in the order.
Nishant Kumar Yadav, deputy commissioner, Gurugram, said, “We will examine it (the order) and prepare a reply.”
Bhushan had last month sent a legal notice to Yadav, who is also the chairman of the District Disaster Management Authority, against the order issued to owners of apartments in towers E, F, and G to vacate their flats without making any provision for the payment of rent to the affected residents.
Following the February 2022 collapse of Tower D, the authorities, after structural audits, recommended the demolition of the tower and the evacuation of nearby towers.
The IIT-D team declared Towers E and F of the complex “unsafe to live” in February this year and the district administration issued an evacuation order later that month.
Manoj Singh, the petitioner and a resident of the housing complex, said that they respect the Supreme Court’s directions and that the builder as well as the district administration should come clean on the issue.
A Chintels Spokesperson said, “We will abide by the directions of the Supreme Court.”
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