Promised Homes, Delayed Keys, Insolvent Builder: Who Protects The People Rohan Developers Left Waiting?
In Gamdevi, original occupants allege they were never given the homes promised under a redevelopment arrangement that began in the early 2000s. Elsewhere, a flat buyer needed the Bombay High Court to contest delay interest running from April 2020. Since February 2025, the developer's flagship company has been in insolvency, with creditor claims in the hundreds of crores. This article sets aside the criminal case against Harresh Mehta and asks a harder question: how did disputes involving ordinary people age for two decades, why did oversight surface so late, and does any regulator protect the weakest party?
Where Do Homebuyers Stand When the Builder Goes Insolvent? The Rohan Developers Creditor Question
Coverage of the Rohan group has been dominated by a CBI bank-fraud investigation, a long-running tax dispute and a figure, ₹280 crore, large enough to crowd out everything else. Absent from that coverage are the people for whom a developer’s promises are not abstractions: families who surrendered homes in old Mumbai buildings on the strength of a redevelopment agreement, buyers who paid for flats and waited for keys, and creditors who lent money to a company that has since entered insolvency.
This article sets the criminal case against Harresh Navnitrai Mehta, or Harresh Mehta aside deliberately. On the record available, Harresh Mehta was arrested by the CBI on 20 May 2023, granted bail in June 2023, and has not been shown to have been convicted. The question is institutional: when a promise made to ordinary people goes unfulfilled for years, who notices, who acts, and who pays?
The Gamdevi FIR
In 2025, Mumbai’s Gamdevi Police registered a case involving Rohan Lifescapes and associate Goodwill Properties over the ShivTapi redevelopment project. As reported by Hindustan Times, the police booked the developer and associated persons for alleged cheating and criminal breach of trust. The Free Press Journal’s reporting lists several individuals among the accused, including a person identified as Harresh Mehta.
Two Decades of Waiting
The complaint, as reported, concerns redevelopment arrangements dating to the early-to-mid 2000s. If the complainant’s account is accurate, the original occupants have waited roughly twenty years for premises they were promised. Consider what that means for a household. A family that vacated a home in, say, 2005 and was told to expect a rehabilitation flat has lived through two decades of rent, relocation, aging and, in some cases, death, without the thing it traded its home for.
The cost of that wait is the part least visible in legal filings. Redevelopment is a transaction in which one side hands over its only asset first and trusts the other to perform later. The weaker party carries all the risk for the entire interval. Any serious critique must ask not only whether the developer performed, but why a framework that depends on that trust contains so few mechanisms to detect non-performance early.
The FSI Allegation
The central allegation, as reported, is that FSI intended for rehabilitation was used to construct ShivTapi A and ShivTapi B, while the original occupants did not receive the promised premises. FSI, floor space index, is the buildable area a plot is allowed, and in redevelopment it is the currency of the bargain. Part is typically allotted to rehabilitate existing occupants, and the remainder can be sold on the market to fund the project.
If the complaint is right, the structure of the alleged wrong is simple: the saleable portion was monetised, and the rehabilitation obligation that justified the whole project was left unmet. That would invert the logic of redevelopment, in which sales subsidise rehabilitation. The allegation is specific enough to be tested against sanctioned plans, occupation certificates and sale records, all of which are documentary. The public may fairly ask why those documents did not trigger scrutiny years earlier.
The Consent Controversy
A second allegation concerns consent. The complaint reportedly alleges that consent figures were combined across five plots to reach the required threshold, and it raises questions about how consent was represented. Redevelopment schemes generally require a minimum percentage of occupants to agree before a project proceeds.
If consents for separate plots were aggregated to clear a bar that no single plot could have cleared alone, the effect would be that occupants of one plot could be bound by the votes of another. Such a method, if it occurred as alleged, would raise the possibility that individual occupants’ decisions were diluted. The reported question is not merely technical. Consent is the legal foundation of the entire arrangement. If it was assembled in a manner the rules did not contemplate, then everything built on it, including the sale of flats to third-party buyers, rests on shaky ground. Those buyers, who had no part in the original bargain, would then be among the people most exposed.
MHADA and the Vigilance Report
The complainant reportedly relied on an MHADA vigilance report in support of the allegations. MHADA, the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, is the statutory body with a stake in such redevelopment, and the complaint also raised questions about MHADA’s share. That a vigilance report exists is significant. That it has surfaced in connection with an FIR raises the question the briefing cannot answer: when was it prepared, and what was done with it?
Two possibilities exist, and neither reflects well on oversight. If the report was prepared years ago and the authority did not act, then a regulator held a finding and left occupants waiting. If it was prepared recently in response to the complaint, then twenty years passed with no systematic inspection of whether a redevelopment under its jurisdiction was delivering what it promised. Where was oversight between the early 2000s and 2025? The briefing does not say. A reporter should obtain the report’s date, its author and any follow-up correspondence.
Anticipatory Bail and the Accountability Gap
By May 2025, according to the Free Press Journal, the accused had obtained anticipatory bail, and no arrests had taken place. This is a lawful and ordinary protection, and the presumption of innocence is not negotiable. Nothing in it suggests wrongdoing by the courts or the accused.
But it does bear on how the complainants experience accountability. For occupants who have waited twenty years, an FIR with no arrests, followed by a slow investigation, can feel like a process that moves at the developer’s convenience rather than theirs. The legitimate protection of the accused and the legitimate impatience of the aggrieved are in tension, and Indian criminal procedure offers little to reconcile them. An FIR may open an investigation, but it does not give occupants their homes. The relief they want, rehabilitation premises, is a civil and regulatory remedy that a criminal complaint cannot deliver.
A Buyer’s Delay: The Bombay High Court Order
Away from Gamdevi, another strand involves a purchaser. A Bombay High Court order dated 5 August 2024 concerned a challenge by Rohan Developers to a MahaRERA order relating to interest for delay in handing over possession of a flat. The underlying direction was for interest to be paid from 1 April 2020 until actual possession with an Occupation Certificate.
The briefing is careful: a delayed-possession dispute is not fraud, and it should not be labelled as such. But the dates are telling. Interest running from April 2020 and a challenge decided in August 2024 mean that the buyer’s grievance had already consumed more than four years by the time the High Court acted, and possession was still not mentioned as delivered. The statute was designed to compress such disputes. Yet even a buyer who wins before the regulator may find that winning is the start of a second contest, in which the developer appeals and the money stays unpaid.
The Insolvency: What the Claims Show
On 6 February 2025, Rohan Developers Private Limited entered the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process, with Neehal Mahamulal Pathan as initial interim resolution professional. The IBBI records Hasti Mal Kachhara as resolution professional from 6 July 2026, and claims were still being updated as of 29 August 2026.
An IBBI claims statement dated 19 April 2025 recorded sixteen unsecured financial-creditor claims totalling ₹324.97 crore, of which eleven, about ₹175.65 crore, were admitted. A later version recorded twelve claims of about ₹181.02 crore, all admitted. These are snapshots, and they must be quoted with their dates, as the briefing insists. But the contrast is striking: roughly ₹149 crore of the claims first received were not admitted in the earlier version, and the later version shows both fewer claims and a smaller total than the number first filed. Why were claims rejected or withdrawn? Who filed them? The statements, at least as summarised, do not say.
Where the Weakest Stand
The more important point is who these numbers include. The figures reported are financial-creditor claims, meaning lenders. They are not the claims of occupants awaiting rehabilitation flats, nor of buyers owed delay interest. Under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, homebuyers have been recognised as financial creditors in certain circumstances, but how that applies to Rohan Developers’ buyers, and whether any such claims were filed, is not shown in the briefing.
The question for a reader is blunt. In an insolvency where hundreds of crores in lender claims are being tallied, where does a family still waiting for a rehabilitation flat appear? A person promised a home is not a lender in the ordinary sense, and the Code’s recovery waterfall favours certain classes. If occupants and buyers are lower in the hierarchy, or absent from it, the process may resolve the developer’s debts while leaving the original promise unfulfilled. The unsecured nature of the lender claims noted in the briefing makes even the lenders’ recovery uncertain. The weakest party’s recovery is less certain still.
A Developer’s Tangle
It would be unjust to treat every proceeding as an indictment. The briefing shows that Rohan group’s tax cases largely collapsed on appeal, that the ₹20.24-crore penalty was deleted by the ITAT, and that a RERA dispute is not a fraud. But the cumulative picture raises a legitimate concern for anyone entrusting savings or a home to the group: a bank-fraud investigation, redevelopment allegations, a delay dispute and insolvency have coexisted for years.
The overlap should concern regulators. A company whose creditors are claiming hundreds of crores, whose group faces a criminal complaint about unmet rehabilitation, and whose buyers are litigating delay is a company whose obligations to ordinary people deserved closer monitoring long before an insolvency tribunal intervened.
Do RERA, MHADA and the IBC Protect Anyone?
Three regimes touch this story. RERA gives buyers a forum and delay interest. MHADA oversees redevelopment under its jurisdiction. The IBC provides an orderly process once a company cannot pay its debts. Each addresses a different moment, and each, on the evidence here, arrives late.
RERA compensated a buyer from April 2020 but could not stop the developer from litigating. MHADA’s vigilance report, if it was needed to substantiate occupants’ complaints, appeared only around a police case. The IBC began in February 2025, after the obligations had been unmet for years. Each mechanism treats the consequence of non-performance. None, on this record, prevented it. The weakest party is protected after the damage is measurable, not while it is accumulating.
What a Better System Would Ask
A system serious about the weakest party would ask early questions. Has rehabilitation been delivered in step with sales? Do consent records withstand audit? Are escrow accounts holding sale proceeds against rehabilitation commitments? Are periodic inspections reported publicly? None of these questions is exotic, and none appears from the briefing to have been answered in public before the FIR.
It would also treat occupants’ claims as creditor-grade obligations. If a family gave up a home for a promise, the promise has a value, and an insolvency process that cannot price it is incomplete.
The Larger Indictment
Whatever the courts ultimately decide about the Gamdevi complaint, the Rohan matter exposes a pattern in which the people with the most to lose have the least visibility. Occupants wait, buyers litigate, and lenders file claims, while oversight arrives in the form of a vigilance report, a police case or an insolvency order, each after the fact.
The Gamdevi allegations are unproven, the delay dispute is a civil matter and the insolvency is not a verdict. But taken together, they ask a question institutions have yet to answer: if a promise to a family can age for twenty years before any authority formally intervenes, what exactly was the oversight for? Until that question is answered, the promised homes remain the least certain assets in the room.
