Residents and apartment owners of Noida, at the receiving end of builders who fleece them on common area maintenance charges, are fighting for an end to this practice. For this, the owners associations want the Paschimanchal Vidut Vitran Nigam Limited (PVVNL) that supplies power to Noida to ban collection of common area maintenance charges like the Noida Power Corporation Ltd has done.
The NPCL has banned the collection of common area maintenance dues from residents by developers of housing projects, whereas PVVNL has
given them a license to do so. Now this has been misused by the builders as a matter of routine.
PVVNL has sent a notice to the builder of Supertech Capetown, a residential complex in Sector-74, Noida, for alleged irregularities in collection of power tariff from apartment owners.
Arun Sharma, a resident had registered a complaint against the builder for allegedly deducting common area maintenance (CAM) charge from each respective consumer in the society. They also charged the builder collecting exorbitant charges. noida local news
Capetown is not the only group housing project in the city, where builder has been deducting CAM charges from prepaid accounts of the respective customers. It has been the trend in almost all the residential complexes in Noida. Residents from theseresidential complex have been raising similar concerns.
Apartments owners of different residential complex like Amrapali Princely Estate, Aditya Urban Casa and Homes-121, too have similar complaint against the builders.
There is gross violation of the U P Electricity Regulatory Commission guideline that clearly says deemed licensee can only collect power consumption amount as per the prepaid reading meter installed at customers’ homes.
Mukul Singhal, superintending engineer with PVVNL, Noida, when confronted, admitted that they do not carry out surprise checks. “Certainly, if a complaint is made by consumer against the builder, we pay attention to the complaints and solve them as well. But we don’t check them regularly,” he said. It is certainly not possible for the power company to collect consumption bills from each individual residents in high rise apartments. He said, the responsibility of collecting bills from individual consumers has been given to the RWA or builder. Apartment owners should form association to deal with all such issues, he said.
However, formation of an association is not easy as the first election has to be conducted by the builder as per the bye-laws. And herein lies the catch. The builder often tries to prolong this process.
