NEW DELHI: Close to 20 lakh people live in Delhi's apartment blocks for whom buying, selling and transferring property or applying for loans against their property is a bureaucratic hurdle with lots of paperwork and corruption. Delhi Apartment Ownership (DAO) 1987 Act had simplified the process for the flat owners by letting the builder or promoter of the flat execute a lease deed, which worked like a sale deed, and spared the owner from paperwork to correctly furnish title of the property and apply for freehold.
The Act which hasn't been implemented since 1987, when it was notified, is now likely to be scrapped to make way for a new Delhi Apartment Ownership Bill 2013 that is currently being drafted. The new bill, which is among the priorities of the urban development minister Venkaiah Naidu, makes several changes and revisions in the earlier draft which are bound to impact lakhs of apartment owners across the capital.
One major change is taking out cooperative group housing societies and DDA flats from its purview and retaining only privately developed flats. The new bill will also lay down punitive measures against the builder in case he delays the process of handing over management of the common areas to residents' associations and execute the lease deed. Senior DDA officials say the existing Act, which is being replaced with the new bill, did not have any teeth.
"We have decided on some punishment, a fixed sum that the builder will have to pay in case he tries to delay the process of formation of associations or is not willing to hand over the common areas, which we will incorporate in the bill. There were also issues like duplication of authority, as the co-operative group housing societies were also covered by Delhi Co-operative Act. So, we decided to exclude them from the purview of this bill. We are also, through participation of local representatives, working to address other issues that were left unclear in the previous act," said Balvinder Kumar, vice-chairperson, DDA.
with thanks : Times of India : LINK : for detailed news.
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