Vijendra Singh Raghav v. Strategic Developers (2025): A temporary occupancy certificate cannot ground a valid offer of possession

When a project runs years past its promised handover, developers often try to convert the buyer's exit into a forced acceptance of possession by producing some species of municipal sanction. In Vijendra Singh Raghav v. Strategic Developers Pvt. Ltd., the Uttar Pradesh Real Estate Appellate Tribunal confronted one such device: a temporary occupation certificate, offered as if it were the genuine article. The Tribunal refused to let the label do the work, and restored to the allottee the refund remedy that the regulatory authority below had withheld.

The facts in brief

The allottee, Vijendra Singh Raghav, had booked a flat in a project developed by Strategic Developers Private Limited, with contractual possession due around March 2017. The flat was not completed and handed over on time. As the delay stretched on, the allottee sought to exit the project and recover his money rather than wait indefinitely.

Before the UP Real Estate Regulatory Authority, however, the developer met that demand by pointing to a temporary occupation certificate it had obtained for the building. On that footing the Authority, by an order in 2020, declined the refund and instead directed that the allottee take possession. The buyer carried the matter to the Appellate Tribunal.

The question

Two questions were knotted together. First, whether a temporary occupation certificate can be equated with an occupancy certificate, such that the developer is treated as having made a lawful offer of possession. Second, and consequentially, whether an allottee in a long-delayed project loses his right to refund merely because the promoter can wave a provisional municipal document, or whether that right under the statute survives intact.

What the Tribunal held

The Tribunal answered both questions in the allottee's favour. A temporary occupation certificate, it held, is not the occupancy certificate contemplated by the building regulations and by the RERA Act's definitional scheme. The two are different instruments with different legal consequences, and the provisional one cannot be passed off as the final one to manufacture a valid offer of possession.

Because there was no valid occupancy certificate, there was no valid offer of possession, and the developer remained in default on a flat already years overdue. In that situation the allottee's remedy under Section 18 of the RERA Act, 2016 — return of the amount paid, with interest and compensation, where the promoter fails to hand over possession by the agreed date — was fully available. The Tribunal characterised that exit as a right of a particular quality: not a discretionary indulgence dependent on the stage of construction, but an entitlement the allottee may invoke at his option. The right to withdraw from a delayed project, it observed, is an unconditional and unqualified right conferred upon the allottee.

The Tribunal also faulted the Authority below for having travelled beyond the case actually pleaded when it ordered possession on the strength of the temporary certificate, treating that as a serious legal error rather than a permissible exercise of discretion. Setting aside that order, it directed refund of the allottee's deposit together with interest at MCLR plus one percent until the date of payment.

Analysis

The decision turns on a clean conceptual point that developers routinely blur. An occupancy certificate is the regulatory confirmation that a building is fit, complete and lawful for habitation; it is what makes an offer of possession meaningful under Section 18 of the RERA Act and, definitionally, under Section 2(zf). A temporary occupation permission is a stop-gap — useful for limited municipal purposes, but precisely not the certification that the building is finished and ready in the sense the statute requires. To allow the temporary document to discharge the promoter's statutory obligation would let form defeat substance and convert an incomplete building into a deliverable one by paperwork alone.

Equally important is the Tribunal's framing of the refund right as unqualified. This tracks the Supreme Court's settled position that, in cases of delay attributable to the promoter, the allottee's right under Section 18 to withdraw and recover his money with interest is not contingent on the promoter's willingness, the partial completion of the project, or the fact that some other buyers have chosen to accept possession. The point of Section 18 is to give the buyer an exit that the promoter cannot bargain away or defeat by belated, qualified compliance.

The interest measure — MCLR plus one percent — situates the refund within the now-familiar rate architecture used across RERA forums, designed to make the buyer whole for the time-value of money locked up in a stalled project rather than to punish the developer.

Why it matters

For homebuyers, the ruling closes a common escape hatch: a developer cannot defeat a refund claim by producing a provisional or temporary occupation document and recasting the buyer's exit as an unreasonable refusal of possession. The label on the certificate will be tested against its legal substance, and a temporary permission will not be allowed to masquerade as the real occupancy certificate.

For developers, the message is that only a genuine occupancy certificate — issued on actual completion under the applicable building regulations — discharges the obligation to offer possession; anything short of that leaves the promoter exposed to the allottee's withdrawal remedy with interest. And for regulators adjudicating these disputes, the decision is a caution against granting relief on a footing the parties never pleaded, and against accepting a provisional certificate at face value when the statute demands the finished one.

Related on Valkya

• Mantra Lifestyle Homes: possession without an OC and the buyer's refund
• Newtech Promoters v. State of UP: RERA's reach over ongoing projects
• Imperia Structures v. Anil Patni: RERA and consumer remedies run concurrently
• Emaar MGF v. Aftab Singh: arbitration clauses and the homebuyer

Sources

• Verdictum, "Temporary Occupancy Certificate Cannot Justify Offering Possession: UP RERA Appellate Tribunal Orders Refund To Homebuyer"