Until May this year, an ordinary homebuyer who failed to comply with a Real Estate Appellate Tribunal order could, on paper, face imprisonment — a genuinely disproportionate consequence for what is usually a procedural, not a criminal, failure. That's gone now. What's less widely noticed is that the same reform wave has simultaneously handed regulators considerably sharper tools to act against developers, without any buyer complaint needed to trigger them.
The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2026, as it applies to the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, came into force on 7 May 2026 through a notification from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. Its most-discussed change is to Section 68 — previously, a buyer who failed to comply with an Appellate Tribunal order could face imprisonment alongside a monetary penalty. The amendment removes the imprisonment provision entirely for allottees, replacing it with a monetary penalty capped at 10% of the property's cost — treating what is fundamentally a compliance failure as a civil matter rather than a criminal one.
Why This Specific Fix Was Overdue
The Supreme Court has repeatedly framed RERA as a consumer-protection mechanism built to rebalance a real estate market that had historically favoured developers — in Imperia Structures Ltd. v. Anil Patni (2020) and again in Newtech Promoters and Developers Pvt. Ltd. v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2021), the Court described RERA's core purpose as accountability and quick resolution for buyers, not punishment of them. A criminal imprisonment provision aimed at allottees sat awkwardly against that stated purpose from the outset — buyers are, structurally, the party RERA exists to protect, and a jail provision aimed at them for a Tribunal-compliance failure never fit the Act's own logic particularly well. This amendment corrects that specific mismatch without touching the Act's substantive consumer protections.
The Part That Actually Tightens the Screws — on Developers
Running alongside the decriminalisation for buyers, RERA authorities have gained meaningfully sharper enforcement tools this year. Regulators can now take suo moto action against developers — acting on their own initiative, without waiting for an individual buyer to file a complaint — when a project shows signs of delay or non-compliance. Where possession is delayed beyond the permitted grace period, authorities can freeze a developer's bank accounts directly. A "conclusive completion" standard now requires that possession genuinely include everything promised in the original sale documentation — a clubhouse, promised roads, common amenities — not merely a habitable individual unit with amenities still pending indefinitely, closing a long-standing gap where developers could hand over units while treating promised common facilities as an open-ended afterthought. And project fund management has moved toward a three-account structure in several implementing states — buyer payments first land in a collection account, with a mandated percentage automatically routed into a project-specific escrow account, tightening the fund-diversion risk that RERA's original escrow requirement was meant to address but had, in practice, still left room for.
Why the Two Halves of This Reform Fit Together
Read together rather than as two unrelated changes, this is a coherent piece of regulatory design: remove a disproportionate criminal consequence aimed at the party the law exists to protect, while simultaneously strengthening the regulator's ability to act against the party actually most likely to cause the harm RERA was built to prevent. We think this is a genuinely well-calibrated correction, and a useful example of decriminalisation done with real discrimination — reducing punitive severity specifically where it was misdirected, rather than as a blanket softening of the regulatory framework.
What This Means If You're Buying or Have Bought Under-Construction Property
If you're an existing allottee with an active Tribunal matter, the maximum consequence for non-compliance with an order is now a monetary penalty rather than any criminal exposure — a genuinely lower-stakes position than before, though full compliance with legitimate Tribunal directions remains the sensible course regardless. If you're evaluating a new under-construction purchase, it's worth specifically checking whether your state's RERA authority has implemented the newer escrow and conclusive-completion standards, since state-level rollout has not been uniform, and knowing which specific protections actually apply to your purchase — rather than assuming RERA protection is a single, uniform national standard — is worth confirming before booking.