The Brave Pedestrian

Cooperative housing societies are really “Uncooperative” housing societies. Argumentative flat-owners, habitually opposing one another, usually accept whatever clauses the developer and his lawyers include – and therein lies the tragedy. The builder usually gives Financial Bank Guarantees, which are more generalized and less safe than Performance Guarantees, and succeeds in safeguarding his own commercial interests, while making a fool of the society and its members. Housing societies, their office-bearers and their members generally have no idea of the financial risks that are being loaded on them. Chronically unwilling to spend money on and accept advice from serious legal professionals (as against aloo-chaaloo advocates), they accept unnecessary risks with a fatalistic statement: jo sabka hoga, woh hamara hoga. (Only those who have been living away from their houses for many years – usually without rent-allowance from builders – have any idea of the seriousness of these dealings...

7th December 2013, Mumbai: Nowadays, Mumbai looks like one massive construction site. With thousands of buildings at various stages of redevelopment, the gigantic bulldozer of commercial redevelopment is leaving a trail of financial casualties and collateral damage to thousands of citizens. The common man, government and judiciary are all turning a deaf ear to the suffering of thousands of families affected by redevelopment, because they are all in favour of “the majority”. With clever financial engineering, nice brochures and websites, and a pre-planned package of half-truths, builder firms convince thousands of financial illiterates about the attractiveness of their proposals.  Flat owners and office bearers generally don’t know how to read a balance sheet, have no understanding of law, and cannot understand the various risks that they will be made to carry for several years. The beautiful dream of being rewarded with a new and larger house and lakhs of rupees as corpus fund mak...