Haryana RERA has ordered three months' civil imprisonment for a working director of Ansal Properties and Infrastructure Ltd, after she repeatedly failed to appear or comply in a 2022 execution case.
Most RERA enforcement stories end with a monetary penalty. This one doesn't. Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority, Panchkula, has ordered three months' civil imprisonment for Jagath Chandra, a working director of Ansal Properties and Infrastructure Ltd, for what the Authority described as repeatedly defying its orders in an execution petition that's been pending since 2022. Major Phalit Sharma (retd), the Adjudicating Officer who issued the August 17 order, directed that a warrant of arrest be issued once the decree holder completes the standard subsistence-allowance deposit procedure.
What actually pushed the case to this point is worth understanding, because it wasn't a single missed deadline. According to the order, Chandra never appeared in person to respond to a show-cause notice despite being given a third opportunity to do so, and she also didn't appear through video-conferencing, an option the Authority had specifically made available after considering her age and stated medical issues. On top of that, a ₹5,000 cost imposed at an earlier hearing was never paid to the decree holder, even though the order had made that payment a condition precedent for her to proceed further in the case at all.
HRERA was direct about why it wasn't extending a fourth chance. The Authority noted that while another opportunity might ordinarily be granted in a fresh execution petition, doing so here wasn't justified given that the matter had been pending since 2022, with neither the corporate entity nor its directors adhering to prior orders throughout that stretch. It's a pointed distinction: this wasn't treated as one lapse, but as a sustained pattern of non-compliance stretched across roughly four years.
The order didn't stop at this one case. HRERA described what it called a "common tendency" among judgment-debtor companies and their directors to adopt delay tactics and seek repeated adjournments specifically to postpone anticipated adverse action, including directors who avoid show-cause notices directly and instead seek exemptions through legal counsel rather than appearing before the forum themselves. That's a notable thing for a regulator to state plainly in an order, it suggests this case is being used partly to signal a broader enforcement posture, not just resolve one dispute.
HRERA was also explicit about the principle guiding its approach going forward. It said that in executing its orders, it has to balance the rights of the allottee, as decree holder, against those of the promoter, as judgment debtor, but that a sympathetic approach is warranted toward those actually abiding by the law, not toward parties attempting to mislead the forum or harass the other side. On that basis, the Authority concluded plainly that Chandra "did not deserve sympathy in the matter."
The order isn't unconditional. Chandra is directed to undergo three months of civil imprisonment starting from the date of her arrest, unless the judgment-debtor company and its working directors satisfy the underlying order under execution before the sentence is completed. In practice, that means compliance can still stop the imprisonment from running its full course, but only if it actually happens, not merely if it's promised again.
If you're someone pursuing an execution case against a non-compliant developer anywhere in NCR, this order is a useful signal of where regulatory patience is heading: HRERA is explicitly moving past treating non-compliance as a cost of doing business and toward holding individual directors personally accountable when a company itself keeps evading enforcement.
It's also a reminder of why checking a developer's RERA compliance history matters before committing to projects currently listed in Gurugram, since cases like this one usually start with warning signs buyers could have caught earlier. For long-pending execution cases specifically, cases where a favourable order already exists but simply isn't being honoured, this is a concrete example of what escalation can actually look like when a regulator decides delay tactics have gone on long enough.
