Homeowners in India roll up sleeves to complete their unfinished flats

Company News

Lalit Vazirani, a computer programmer from Mumbai, never reckoned on having to turn amateur property developer.

Yet here he is, a decade after putting down a deposit for an apartment near the city's airport, dealing with architects, taxes, various planning permissions and even court hearings. All because the developer behind the $50 million project has gone bust, and nobody else has stepped in to finish the work.

"We never in our wildest dreams imagined one day we would take on the functions and the role of a developer,” said Vazirani, 45, who bought the two-bedroom unit before construction started. “But fate had other plans.”

Few things illustrate the malaise in India’s property market as starkly as would-be homeowners having to dedicate untold hours to completing the flats they spent years saving up for. While no estimates exist for the number of people in Vazirani’s position, India’s property market is struggling to digest some $65 billion worth of projects in various stages of completion -- or, in many cases, non-completion.

It’s an issue with the potential to sap confidence among house buyers, further complicating developers’ attempts to claw their way out from under a mountain of debt.

Weakened Faith

So many delayed building projects have “severely weakened faith in any under-construction properties and reviving buyers’ trust is a Herculean task,” said Anuj Puri, the chairman of Anarock Property Consultants Pvt. “If buyers stop purchasing, builders will have a far more challenging time to get funds from external sources for construction.”

 Two years ago, India introduced a law with strict punishments for building delays...Read More

File your I-T return on time or you may end up in jail like this jeweller

Company News

If you have received a notice for not filing income tax returns within due date, you might want to pay heed to it. In what could probably be the first such instance, a director of Mumbai-based firm Ms Shah Time and Jewels was sentenced to jail for three months on Wednesday for not filing income tax returns within the due date for the assessment year 2014-15, according to The Times of India.

When repeated notices sent to the firm and its director Paresh C Shah did not elicit any response, the deputy commissioner of Income Tax on November 22, 2017, filed a show cause notice seeking an explanation as to why sanction for their provision should not be given under the Income Tax Act. After that also went unanswered, a complaint was filed against Shah and the firm.

The Ballard Pier magistrate court rejected Shah's defence of 'lack of knowledge' and held him and the firm guilty of deliberate non-compliance. The court observed that imprisonment under the Income Tax Act was an exceptional and extreme move and was given only when it established deliberate failure to file returns."In the present case, the accused received the notice, but no explanation was given despite repeatedly serving the notices," additional chief metropolitan magistrate R S Sarkale told TOI. He further said that the explanation given by the director was "not at all acceptable."

The maximum sentence over failure to file I-T returns is two years imprisonment. However, since Ms Shah Time and Jewels did not have a poor history in filing returns, Shah was given a minimum jail-term of three months.

Filing Income Tax returns


 It is mandatory for all registered taxpayers to file income tax returns every year, except for those who are over 80 years of age and do not have any source of income from a business or profession.