Justice JB Pardiwala didn’t mean to write a headline when he said it, but he may as well have: “Not a single litigation from homebuyers in Gujarat.” And then the hammer: almost every major case of unauthorised construction reaching the Supreme Court today comes from Delhi and Mumbai. It was a clinical observation, but for Mumbai — India’s financial capital, its housing capital, its dream merchant — it landed like a diagnosis no one wanted to hear.
Because buried under the glamour of glass towers, marina-facing apartments and launch-day frenzy lies a darker, well-known truth: Mumbai’s real-estate industry behaves not like an economic sector but like a cartel, a system so deeply entrenched that it can defy courts, pocket state benefits, and keep consumers hostage — and still expect applause for “nation-building.”
In the last two years alone, the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court have mapped a pattern that resembles organised crime more than urban development: buildings rising on grabbed land, towers built with underworld-linked developers, projects sold without permissions, and entire suburbs like Thane, Navi Mumbai, Mumbra and Diva choked with illegal structures that various civic bodies themselves admit to having approved, ignored or enabled. Judges have not minced words. They have spoken of a “nexus between tainted officials and developers,” a “land mafia”, a system built on “blessings of government officials.” These are not stray comments; they are judicial summaries of Mumbai’s everyday reality.
But what makes Mumbai’s corruption particularly venomous is not only the illegal towers. It is the silent, systematic extraction from homebuyers — the middle-class worker, the retired couple, the young professional — who pour their life’s savings into the one thing this city sells best: hope.
Take the Land Under Construction tax — a levy the Supreme Court has already ruled illegal, a charge explicitly forbidden from being passed on to buyers. Yet across Mumbai, builders have collected it brazenly, quietly slipping it into agreements, demands, maintenance pre-bills. Money that should never have been taken was extracted as a matter of routine. Not one FIR. Not one blacklisted developer. Not one public apology. In any other industry, such defiance of the Supreme Court would trigger arrests. In Mumbai real estate, it is a Tuesday.
Then came COVID. The entire industry staggered under economic paralysis and the Maharashtra government stepped in with a once-in-a-generation incentive: a 50% reduction in all premiums, levies and charges. The state explicitly said the relief must translate into reduced costs for homebuyers — lower loading, softer pricing, or at least a meaningful benefit on stamp duty. Instead, Mumbai’s developers pocketed the entire bonanza. Flat prices did not fall by a rupee. Loading did not reduce. Floor-rise premiums remained untouched. Stamp duty relief was not passed on. A historic waiver meant to protect the consumer became a historic jackpot for the cartel.
You begin to see the pattern. When the law bans a charge, they collect it. When the government gives them a subsidy, they keep it. When the courts order demolition, they file affidavits of helplessness. When buyers ask questions, they are handed photocopied circulars and a smile polished by decades of impunity. In Mumbai, a builder does not merely construct a tower. He constructs a system of dependence — on municipal officials, on politicians, on financiers, on cooperative banks, on planning authorities, on regulators too slow or too timid to challenge them.
Meanwhile, the casualties pile up. In Wadala, 102 homebuyers were cheated of nearly ₹100 crore in a project that barely rose above the plinth. In Jogeshwari, investors were duped with laughable promises of 18% quarterly returns. In Thane, entire clusters of illegal towers rose not by accident but by design, on plots swallowed by “land mafias.” Navi Mumbai admitted in court to more than 2,100 illegal structures. Each building has a file. Each file has signatures. Each signature tells the same story: the system was in on it.
And yet, Mumbai’s homebuyers — the most financially stretched urban middle class in India — are expected to navigate this minefield alone. They are told to “do due diligence.” As if due diligence can protect you from a system where violations are authorised, illegal floors are regularised, and the benefits meant for you are rerouted to a balance sheet you will never see.
This is why Justice Pardiwala’s remark stings so much. Not because Gujarat is perfect — that is a different debate — but because Mumbai’s numbers reveal something more disturbing: a metropolis where illegality is not the exception but the business model. A city where the law is elastic for developers and iron for buyers. Where every incentive, every waiver, every proclamation of “ease of doing business” becomes, almost automatically, ease of fleecing the customer.
If this were not a mafia ecosystem, would builders dare ignore a Supreme Court ban on LUC tax? Would they dare swallow thousands of crores in COVID-era waivers and pass nothing on to consumers? Would they dare build towers linked by the highest court to the underworld? Would civic officials keep their jobs after overseeing 2,000 illegal structures? Would buyers be the ones punished when a tower is demolished?
Mumbai does not need more regulations. It needs the courage to acknowledge the truth: the city’s real-estate economy has been captured. By money, by muscle, by political patronage, by bureaucratic complicity. And until that capture is broken — not discussed, not debated, but broken — its skyline will keep rising on foundations of illegality.
For a city that sells dreams, Mumbai’s housing market has become the one place where dreams are first monetised, then manipulated, and finally murdered in broad daylight. And the most tragic part?
Everyone knew. The courts merely said it out loud. |
