Imagine this you paid 90% of the money to buy your dream home, but even after 11 years, the house is still not constructed. You patiently wait. But one day, you discover the builder has declared itself insolvent. This is what happened with a group of 2,300 homebuyers in Noida. They have paid INR 1,400 crore (~$171 million), and the builder in question is Wave Megacity Centre—incorporated in 2011 as a special-purpose vehicle of INR 500 crore (~$61 million) Wave Group. While the story of real-estate companies stripping people of their life savings and not delivering homes is sadly all too common, what is uncommon is the approach Wave took. It approached India's insolvency court and exploited a loophole left by Section 10 in India's bankruptcy. The section allows an entity to initiate insolvency proceedings against itself in case of debt and default. The insolvency court threw out Wave's petition in 2022, thanks to the homebuyers rallying together and building a watertight case against the developer. But this case has raised lawmakers' hackles as it could be a new experiment by real-estate developers that could wreck homes. So much so that it has triggered closed-door discussions in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) to amend this problematic section. The ministry has sought comments from the public.
