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Human
beings need a house to live. They lived in caves in the ancient days. Slowly
with time they found a solution with various forms of dwelling to come out of
the caves. As they advanced their dwelling also improvised with time and new
inventions. The available land space was limited, but the population kept on
increasing. Faced with the challenge human beings constructed a building with a
house over a house to save the land which came to be called as apartment or
flat. This increased the person per square feet occupancy in the crowded cities
of the world.
Courtesy Booking.com
The
Apartment is a word spoken by Americans and Canadians whereas the word Flat is
used by the British and their Commonwealth countries meaning the same thing of
residential self-contained space inside the building. Apartment living can be
traced back to ancient Rome, where multi-story residential buildings known as
insulated house of the urban population. However, the concept of modern
apartments began to take shape in the 18th century, primarily in response to
growing urbanization. In some countries, the word “unit” is a more general term
referring to both apartments and rental business “suites”. In the United
States, some apartment-dwellers own their units, either as a housing cooperative, in which the residents own shares of a
corporation that owns the building or development. In a condominium,
residents own the air space of the apartments and the company retains ownership
of the infrastructure and the public spaces. Condominium owners
are often said to own the "air space" of a unit in a multi-unit
development. This means that the condo owner's title to the property does not
include the four walls that divide their unit from other units or common areas in the property.
Indian
civilisation evolved from the huts of the of the sages and villagers. Then came
the mortar and bricks followed by the concrete. India basically dwelled in its
independent huts, homes, chawls, hawelis and Palaces. The average housing area
is 103 sq. ft per person in rural areas and 117 sq. ft per person in urban
areas. The first apartment building in India was likely the Saraswat
Co-operative Housing Society in Mumbai, built in 1915. Mr Anantharaman and his
brother built the first apartment in Malleswaram of Bengaluru in the year 1970.
This gave way to the new apartment culture in Bengaluru. As the number of the
apartments increased the government felt the need of laws to govern the same.
The government enacted the new laws of KAOA 1972 and KOFA 1972 when the
Karnataka Cooperative Societies Act 1959 was already existing and being used by
these apartments like the Paresh Apartments Cooperative Housing Society, which
was involved in construction of the first apartment of Bengaluru. The seeds of
the present problems were sowed at that time but was dormant due to the lack
lustre interest in the property rights. In view of the skyrocketing prices of
the land, the greed to retain it became one of the priorities of the promoters
of the real estate project. The sold project land was used by many of the
promoters to mortgage the land and raise funds for their next projects. To hold
on to this it was necessary to keep the title with them. For which they made a
law accordingly to support their interest. There has not been any action on
such illegal practices yet by any authority against the people who do it nor
the banks which advance the huge amount for the new project keeping the lands
of the sold property as collateral without the knowledge of the flat buyers.
Earlier days such information was not available to the common man. Nowadays,
the same is available in the Ministry of Commerce website https://www.cersai.org.in. CERSAI is a Government of India Company formed under
the provision of section 8 of Companies Act 2013. Anyone interested can
log into this website and find out the details of the mortgage of their
apartments. The Banks, Reserve bank, the Government, the Departments and the
Courts are silent on this fraud being done by few promoters. The problem will
aggravate if the repayment is affected by the loss of the business. The home
buyers may lose their property to the lender if something goes wrong with time.
Some apartment owners have started raising voice but majority of them are busy
with their daily work and don’t have enough to spare for this cause leaving the
few to fight the mighty lobby. There were incidents of the Metro land
acquisition where the original land owners claimed the compensation. In another
case the financier of the builder stuck notices on the doors of the new owners
for non-payment by the builder. There are plenty such news which go unnoticed
by the media emboldening the violators to move ahead in the same manner. The
home buyers need to be careful before they purchase the property and raise
their voice after they do to prevent exploitation. Silence is considered as acceptance
as in “Mounam Sammati lakshanam”.
-By Vidyadhar Durgekar,
Advocate, Author & Poet,
Ex Dy Commandant(CG)
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