Court recommends Maharashtra Regulatory Body to resume the hybrid hearing in 4 weeks

The Bombay High Court founded the Maharashtra Real Estate Regulatory Authority (Maharera) on Thursday to restore the hybrid model of hearings, meaning that parties can opt for physical or virtual appearances within four weeks.

The court ruled that “procedural fairness includes the rights of the parties to choose their way of hearing, especially when both physical and virtual modalities are feasible.”

The direction came after a petition was submitted by a city dweller who was looking for a timely execution of a 2020 order in his favor and the court asked to streamline the Maharera performance procedure.

The petitioner emphasized systemic delays, the absence of a mechanism for urgent hearings, lack of physical hearing options Post-Pandemic and one-way communication of the authorities.

The Bank of Justices Revati Mohite Dere and Neela Gokhale noted that although virtual hearings were introduced because of COVID-19, Maharera’s continuous insisting on a virtual model only, despite the infrastructure for physical hearings, was untroy and harmful for access to the judge.

“Access to the court is a constitutional guarantee and cannot be reduced to purely formality,” the court said, and emphasizes that procedural fairness includes the rights of the parties to choose their hearing method.

The jury members noted that tribunals, founded to offer quickly and decentralized justice, should be accessible both in form and substance.

The bank noted that even the APEX court said that “access to virtual hearings is only insufficient. Defense of physical hearing, even if there are provisions, amounts to an unreasonable carter on the rights of the procedurers.”

Accordingly, the Maharera District Court has ordered to repair hybrid hearings, to keep a register of urgent entries, order to be a time stamping, to allocate fixed hearing data and to display public functional contact details and cause list.

The court has made it clear that these instructions are aimed at reinventing the functioning of Maharera with the principles of inclusiveness, transparency and timely assessment. A compliance report was sought on 4 September.

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