Buying A Home

Many of you would have seen Khosla Ka Ghosla, which hit the screens about a decade ago chronicling the journey of how Mr. Khosla gets his long cherished house after several bottlenecks. Perhaps, the film was inspirational for the government of the day to finally think up of establishing a regulator to legalise the housing sector. Since time immemorial, the most wanting desire of Indians has been the ownership of one’s house. There is plenty to read about from mythology and various films over the decades recording the great Indian dream of owning a house, to the extent that in certain communities marriages are arranged only if the groom has a house of his own.

- Narayan Krishnamurthy

Cut to 2017, the real estate landscape has changed drastically from the times of Kishan Khurana, the portly broker portrayed by the affable Boman Irani in the movie. Today, the real estate sector is in shambles. If you drive out into the two big residential hubs of NCR—Noida and Gurugram, you will encounter several ghost developments with incomplete structures and vacant plots. The story is similar in other metros too. The real sufferer—the buyer who took advantage of low interest rates and tax breaks on home loans to plunge into borrowing for that dream home. Many, in fact borrowed to fund a slightly bigger house than they could afford, because the EMIs looked convenient to repay. Today, many buyer groups are collectively fighting the builder lobby to hand over their promised homes. Several cases are registered in consumer courts and legal battles are being fought.