From Colonial Transfer to Consumer Protection: The Evolution of Real Estate Law in India and the Unfinished Promise of the Rera Framework a Critical Analysis of Legislative History, Statutory Design, and the Persistence of Homebuyer Vulnerability

Abstract

The trajectory of real estate law in India traces a path from colonial-era statutes designed for bilateral property transfers between individual parties, through decades of piecemeal regulatory accretion, to the enactment of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 (hereinafter RERA or the Act) — the country's first dedicated statute governing the relationship between real estate developers and homebuyers. This article examines that trajectory in three parts. The first part analyses the pre-RERA legislative landscape, identifying the structural inadequacies of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882, the Indian Contract Act, 1872, the Specific Relief Act, 1963, and the Maharashtra Ownership Flats Act, 1963 as instruments of homebuyer protection. The second part examines RERA's statutory architecture and the judicial interpretation of its provisions by the Supreme Court of India, with particular attention to the decisions in Pioneer Urban Land and Infrastructure Ltd. v. Union of India, Imperia Structures Ltd. v. Anil Patni, Newtech Promoters and Developers Pvt. Ltd. v. State of Uttar Pradesh, and Forum for People's Collective Efforts v. State of West Bengal. The third part draws on primary empirical data from a 2025 field study of 2,458 respondents in Bengaluru to demonstrate that the passage of RERA has not resolved the homebuyer's vulnerability — it has reconfigured it. The article concludes that the implementation gap between RERA's statutory protections and their practical realisation is not incidental but structural, shaped by institutional capacity constraints, geographic information asymmetries, adjudicatory delay, and the unresolved intersection of RERA enforcement with insolvency proceedings.