Mantri Serenity on Kanakapura Road, where booking began in 2012 but the project was stalled in 2018 due to lack of funds, has emerged as the first realty project in Bengaluru to be completed using funding from the SWAMIH Investment Fund, a special scheme by the Union government to ensure completion of stalled housing projects.
The project received funding from SWAMIH Investment Fund in October 2020, the quantum of which is undisclosed. Recently, the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) issued Occupancy Certificate (OC) for towers 4 and 5 that have 1,240 apartments, including 100 reserved for Economically Weaker Sections. Work is almost complete in towers 1 and 3, and are expected to get OCs by the BDA, sources said.
Santosh Patil, one of the relieved home-buyers in Mantri Serenity, paid ₹1 crore for an apartment in 2016, and had been facing a double whammy of house rent and EMIs on the home loan ever since. “The SWAMIH fund made our dream of a home a reality, without which we don’t think the project would have ever been completed,” he said.
Though Karnataka Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA-K) has ordered the developer to pay interest for the intervening period of delay, its order is yet to be implemented, said Mr. Patil. “RERA-K has mostly been ineffective in implementing its orders, thereby providing little relief to home-buyers,” he said.
Bengaluru South MP Tejaswi Surya had intervened on behalf of home-buyers and had appealed to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to provide funding through SWAMIH Investment Fund.
A project by Ozone Group in Whitefield has also received an undisclosed amount as funding from SWAMIH Investment Fund. The fund is a special scheme of the Union government supported by SBICAP Ventures, an alternative asset manager that recovers the funding to the stalled project through the sale of apartments.
“The stress fund was the brainchild of Fight for RERA, India, a collective of home-buyers and citizen activists who fought for the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016. We are happy that several stalled projects are being finished using the SWAMIH fund turning home=buyers’ dreams into reality,” said M. S. Shankar, general secretary, Forum for People’s Collective Efforts, formerly known as Fight for RERA.
