Written by Ai Powered PMC Akbar Jiwani :Special correspondent for realestate [email protected]
A regulatory order signed in New Delhi on the last day of July has quietly shifted the possession date on thousands of Indian homes. On 31 July 2026, the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs advised every state Real Estate Regulatory Authority to extend the registration and completion timelines of eligible registered projects by four months, invoking the force majeure provisions of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016. Within a fortnight, MahaRERA, Haryana RERA and the Telangana authority had converted that advisory into blanket orders. For developers wrestling with disrupted supply chains, it is meaningful breathing room. For homebuyers already counting months, it is one more calendar page turned. Both readings are correct — and the gap between them is where the real story sits.
Background: What Section 6 Actually Permits
Section 6 of the RERA Act allows the registration granted to a project to be extended on the ground of force majeure. The statute does not leave the term to interpretation: it expressly contemplates war, flood, drought, fire, cyclone, earthquake and other calamities affecting the regular development of a project. Ordinarily the section is not self-executing — a promoter must apply to the concerned authority, project by project, and satisfy it that the disruption was genuine.
India has been here before. When the Ministry of Finance treated the COVID-19 pandemic as a force majeure event in 2020, a suo motu six-month extension followed for projects whose registration was expiring, and several state authorities — MahaRERA and Haryana RERA among them — granted extensions in the six-to-nine-month range without individual applications. That episode established both the mechanism and its limits, and its litigation legacy still shapes how tribunals read force majeure today.
Current Developments: The Chain of Orders
The current relief traces back to an Office Memorandum issued by the Department of Expenditure, Ministry of Finance, on 29 April 2026, which treated the prevailing situation in West Asia as war for the purpose of invoking force majeure. That classification was the legal hinge. Once war was formally recognised, Section 6 of RERA became available to the sector as a whole rather than to individual promoters pleading their own facts.
The Confederation of Real Estate Developers Associations of India had written to the Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary in April, seeking a blanket extension of three to six months and citing volatility in energy supplies that had disrupted production across key manufacturing clusters. The Ministry, in its 31 July advisory signed by Under Secretary (Housing) Sanjay Kumar, recorded that it had received representations from stakeholders regarding the impact of the prevailing situation in West Asia, which had adversely affected global supply chains, resulting in shortages of construction materials and impacting the timely completion of real estate projects.
The advisory sets a clear eligibility line. Registered projects whose completion date, revised completion date or extended completion date falls on or after 28 February 2026 receive four additional months. Critically, the Ministry recommended that states issue a single common order covering all eligible projects, precisely so that promoters would not have to file thousands of separate applications and authorities would not have to pass thousands of separate orders.
MahaRERA followed with a blanket order applying the extension automatically, with no separate application required from promoters — and with one important boundary: projects registered on or after 1 August 2026 are excluded, since a developer registering after the disruption was public knowledge cannot claim to have been surprised by it. Haryana RERA issued a parallel order for projects registered with it. The Telangana authority extended completion timelines for all eligible registered projects in the state on the same reasoning. In Uttar Pradesh, roughly 1,199 projects are reported to qualify, including about 301 in Noida and 148 in Ghaziabad — a useful indicator of the scale involved in a single state.
Detailed Analysis: A Section 6 Order, Not a Section 18 Amnesty
The most consequential feature of the 31 July circular is what it does not say. It addresses Section 6 alone — the extension of project registration on force majeure grounds. It does not advise authorities to grant an interest holiday for the four-month window, and it does not disturb a buyer’s entitlement to interest on refund when exiting a delayed project.
That distinction matters because Section 18 operates on a different logic. It entitles an allottee whose possession is delayed either to withdraw and receive a refund with interest, or to remain in the project and receive monthly interest for every month of delay. Nothing in Section 18 makes that liability conditional on, or subject to, a force majeure clause. The Supreme Court has said as much in unambiguous terms. In Imperia Structures Ltd v Anil Patni and in Newtech Promoters and Developers Pvt Ltd v State of Uttar Pradesh, the Court characterised the allottee’s right to interest at the prescribed rate as unqualified and indefeasible. MahaRERA’s own Model Agreement for Sale points the same way: Clause 6 does not exempt a promoter from interest liability merely because the delay arose from circumstances beyond the promoter’s control.
Promoters will nonetheless argue — not unreasonably at first glance — that if the state has declared a war, recognised force majeure and formally moved the completion date, interest cannot accrue during a period the regulator itself has excused. The counter-argument is that Section 6 governs the life of a registration while Section 18 governs a contractual and statutory obligation to the buyer, and that extending one does not extinguish the other. The honest position is that this remains legally untested. Until either the Housing Ministry issues a clarificatory circular or an appellate tribunal or High Court rules squarely on the point, it is a grey area — and grey areas in real estate are usually resolved by whoever litigates first.
Benefits: Why the Order Was Needed
The administrative case for a common order is strong. Filing individual Section 6 applications across tens of thousands of registered projects would have consumed regulatory bandwidth that authorities do not have, and would have delivered inconsistent outcomes to developers facing identical macro conditions. A single order applied uniformly is faster, cheaper and fairer than adjudicating the same fact pattern thousands of times over.
There is also a compliance benefit that is easy to overlook. A lapsed registration is not a paperwork problem — it stops marketing, complicates lender disbursements and can freeze sales in an otherwise healthy project. Keeping registrations valid keeps projects inside the regulated perimeter, where buyers retain their remedies. CREDAI president Shekhar Patel framed the extension as helping developers align completion timelines with the current market scenario while relieving them of the burden of filing separate applications, and argued that orderly execution safeguards all stakeholders, including homebuyers. NAREDCO likewise welcomed the regulatory clarity.
The macro context supports the argument that the sector is not in distress but in friction. MahaRERA approved 10,379 housing projects in FY26, with Pune and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region accounting for the largest share of new registrations — hardly the profile of a market retreating from supply. The constraint being addressed is input availability and logistics, not demand.
Challenges: The Buyer’s Objection
Homebuyer groups have not been persuaded, and their objection deserves to be stated at full strength. The Forum for Peoples Collective Efforts has argued that the advisory reflects an asymmetry in how the two sides of the transaction are treated: developers receive a one-size-fits-all regulatory accommodation issued from the top, while buyers servicing home loan EMIs and simultaneously paying rent receive no corresponding relief, no blanket protection and no automatic order in their favour.
The second and more practical concern is discrimination between projects. A blanket order cannot distinguish a developer genuinely stalled by a shortage of imported facade systems or specialised electromechanical equipment from one whose project was already running years late for reasons that predate February 2026 entirely. The 28 February cut-off is a blunt instrument, and a chronically delayed project inherits the same four months as a well-run one. Force majeure is meant to suspend obligations for the duration of the disrupting event, not to launder pre-existing default.
There is a third risk, subtler but real: precedent. Each blanket extension makes the next one easier to seek. COVID established the template; the West Asia conflict has now invoked it a second time. If sector-wide extensions become the routine answer to macro volatility, the deterrent effect of a hard RERA completion date begins to soften.
Expert Opinion
Advocate Shirish V Deshpande, chairman of the Mumbai Grahak Panchayat, has argued that the July circular concerns Section 6 alone and gives promoters no exemption from monthly interest for continuing delays in projects that were already delayed as of 28 February 2026, where buyers elect to remain. In his reading, force majeure may operate as a mitigating factor where a buyer seeks compensation over and above statutory interest, but it does not switch off the statutory interest itself. He has urged the Housing Ministry to issue a clarificatory circular stating its position, so that aggrieved parties can seek a final judicial determination on a settled record rather than litigating in the dark.
That call for clarity is, in editorial judgement, the single most useful thing that could happen next. Ambiguity here does not favour buyers or developers — it favours delay, and delay is the thing everyone claims to be trying to fix.
Future Outlook
Three developments are worth watching over the next two quarters. First, whether MoHUA issues the clarificatory circular on interest liability; its content will determine whether pending complaints settle or escalate. Second, whether appellate tribunals begin producing reasoned orders on the Section 6 versus Section 18 question — the first well-argued decision will set the tone. Third, whether the remaining states issue common orders, and whether they replicate MahaRERA’s 1 August registration cut-off, a sensible anti-gaming safeguard worth standardising nationally.
The broader signal is more encouraging than the headline suggests. A regulator that can absorb a genuine external shock through a transparent, published, uniformly applied order is functioning as intended. The failure mode would have been silence — registrations quietly lapsing, or thousands of inconsistent individual extensions granted behind closed doors.
Practical Takeaways
For homebuyers: check your allotment letter or agreement for sale against the MahaRERA portal to confirm the revised completion date now recorded for your project. The extension is automatic, so the portal date may have moved without any communication from your developer. If your project was already delayed before 28 February 2026, take written advice before assuming the extension has suspended your interest entitlement — on the current state of the law and the Supreme Court authority, it very likely has not.
For developers and promoters: no separate application is required, but the extension does not travel with the project automatically in every disclosure you make. Update your Form 3 and quarterly progress reporting, ensure sales teams and channel partners communicate the revised date accurately, and document the specific supply-chain disruption your project actually suffered. If interest liability is later contested, generic reliance on the common order will be far weaker than a project-level evidentiary record.
For cooperative housing societies in redevelopment: verify with your developer whether your project falls on the eligible side of the 28 February 2026 line, and insist that any revised timeline be reflected in a formal addendum to the development agreement rather than treated as an informal understanding. A regulatory extension does not by itself amend a contract between a society and its developer, and the two documents should not be allowed to diverge.
Conclusion
The four-month extension is a defensible administrative response to a genuine external disruption, delivered through the mechanism Parliament built into the statute for exactly this purpose. It is also, unmistakably, relief that moves in one direction. The Act’s architecture protects the buyer’s interest entitlement independently of the promoter’s registration timeline, and the Supreme Court has already said that entitlement is indefeasible. What is missing is an explicit official statement saying so. Issuing that clarification would cost the government nothing and would spare the sector a season of avoidable litigation. Until then, the sensible course for every party is the same one that has always served this industry best: read the order, read the statute, and do not assume the second follows the first.
