Amid oversupply, slackening demand and financial troubles, many builders have not been able to deliver homes to buyers, leaving the latter in the lurch. The buyers in turn have taken recourse to filing cases against builders: a total of 1,821 cases under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) 2016 were pending in the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) at the end of September.

Data regarding cases filed against builders for defaults of less than a month is not available with NCLT, said Anurag Singh Thakur, minister of state for finance & corporate affairs, in a written reply to a question in Lok sabha on Monday.

He said the matter of the status of homebuyers as financial creditors or modification of the definition of default in these cases in order to reduce the number of insolvency cases filed against builders in the NCLTs for small defaults is under consideration of the ministry of corporate affairs.

The government is taking all steps to strengthen the NCLT in terms of number of benches, number of courts and number of members, to reduce the burden of the NCLT.

Five new benches have been announced during 2018-19 at Jaipur, Cuttack, Kochi, Indore and Amaravati. The government has also appointed 28 more members in NCLT recently and vacant posts of members in NCLT are being filed up regularly. For capacity building of members, regular colloquiums are being held. The e-Court project is also being implemented by NIC for all the benches of NCLT.