Burdened judiciary to benefit from clubbing of cases

[webmaster]

Getting home owners under one umbrella for litigation will save their time and money and ease burden of courts.

With the National Consumer Disputes Re dress al Commission (NCRDC) Bench interpreting Section 12 (1) ( c) to include all homebuyers having similar grievances over quality of construction, delay in possession or maintenance issues, buyers can now hope to get quick relief by approaching the commission directly instead of filing a case first in the lower courts.
Homebuyers facing delivery delays can file a case with NCRDC without registering under an umbrella body or an association, as was required earlier. “What this means is that if 15 cases are going on against the same builder and the compliant is common, this class action suit is applicable”, says SK Pal, a Supreme Court lawyer.

The ruling says, under Section 12 ( 1) ( c) of the Consumer Protection Act, irrespective of whether they have filed the case or not, buyers will be eligible for benefits.

Clubbing all cases will lift the burden of a judiciary dealing separately with a bunch of cases against one builder. One ruling in a case will be applicable to all consumers and one case with the common thread will be good enough. The judgment is important because a large number of people filing a complaint would make it something like a public interest litigation, says Pal.

Since numerous complaints were piling up in the consumer courts, overburdening them, the Bench decided to club similar complaints to save time and also reduce the number of cases piling before the judiciary.

This was earlier being done through consumer associations that were predominantly created for the protection of consumers and registered under the ministry of corporate affairs, explains Pal. The procedure has now been simplified. A public notice in the media is enough to include all homebuyers unable to fight a case due to financial constraints or by virtue of residing abroad, to become party to a case by default.

“This is a path-breaking judgment for buyers, who will now get the benefits without going through a judicial process,’’ said Sahil Sethi, senior associate at law firm Saikrishna and Associates.

Amit Chauhan of Logical Buyer, a real estate blog for homebuyers, calls this a positive development which makes it easy for homebuyers to approach the consumer forum. The court has empowered all homebuyers having a similar grievance. The second biggest benefit is that homebuyers can now skip the lower forums such as district commission, the state commission and approach the NCRDC directly. Also now consumers would take just two years to get relief in a case instead of five to six years earlier.

Source: HT Estates

[bienpanda]

How Many cases are against RPS Savana. If 15 cases have been filed we can go for a class action suit.
I have filed a case in the District Forum, New Delhi and the final hearing is expected early next year.
Any case in the National Forum?

Regds

[anuj]

Hello Panda Sir,

Good number of cases are going against RPS in all forms of court (District, State and National Commission). You can get the details of these cases from the below:
http://cms.nic.in/ncdrcusersWeb/login.d ... caseStatus
One of the case where people have clubbed is CC/108/2011 going in National commission. You will get all the details of the ongoing cases from the above mentioned website.

Regards,
Kapoor