MahaRERA's 8 Judges: A Data Audit of 33,000 cases Reveals Backlogs, Settlements, and the Uneven Justice Facing India's Homebuyers

This report is produced by Judge My Lawyer, India's legal analytics platform, based on an analysis of 33,805 cases filed before the Maharashtra Real Estate Regulatory Authority (MahaRERA). Case-level data was sourced directly from MahaRERA's publicly accessible case management portal, covering all proceedings recorded across the authority's eight adjudicating officers from 2017 through 2026. The dataset encompasses nine years of filings — standard homebuyer complaints, non-compliance applications, execution proceedings, review applications, and online complaints — and represents the most comprehensive case-level audit of MahaRERA's adjudicatory record published to date.

The RERA Act promised homebuyers something simple: a decision within 60 days of filing a complaint. Eight years after the Maharashtra Real Estate Regulatory Authority opened its doors, the promise has collapsed under the weight of 33,805 cases — 80.8% of which remain pending. For cases that did reach a verdict, the average wait was 482 days, more than eight times the statutory limit. The slowest bench averaged over 1,000 days per disposal. Two cases filed before 2020 are still open in 2026.

These are not administrative footnotes. They are the daily reality of homebuyers who paid for apartments, waited for possession that never came, filed complaints with MahaRERA, and now wait again — for hearings that are adjourned, settlements that are never formally closed, and orders that appear in the record as favourable to developers while the cases remain technically open.

Judge My Lawyer's case-level analysis surfaces the full picture: not just who disposes the most, but how long pending cases have aged, which respondent lawyers are associated with the longest proceedings, which developers win at statistically unusual rates before specific benches, and where the data reveals patterns that demand scrutiny.

The Full Scorecard: All Eight Adjudicators

Complainant Win % excludes settled matters. Avg Days excludes zero-duration filings.

The Backlog Crisis: Cases That Sit and Age

The 60-day RERA mandate is a statutory obligation under Section 29(2). The following table measures how many pending cases before each bench have already crossed the one-, two-, three-, and five-year thresholds — failing the statutory timeline by factors of 6, 12, 18, and 30.

Ajoy Mehta carries 870 pending cases averaging 1,195 days and climbing — 45 have been open over three years. Manoj Saunik: 250 of his 282 pending cases (88.7%) have been waiting over a year with nothing moving. Vasant Prabhu: despite the highest disposal rate, 26 pending cases have been open over three years and 2 over five. Vijay Satbir Singh left behind 1,007 unresolved cases when his tenure ended in 2023 — they now have no active bench assignment.

MahaRERA Adjudicator Performance: Judge-by-Judge Profiles

Vijay Satbir Singh — 2,696 Cases | 2017–2023

Singh cleared almost all enforcement applications while fewer than 58% of standard complaints reached resolution. His tenure ended in 2023, leaving 1,007 pending cases — including 12 over three years old and 2 over five years — with no active assigned bench.

Mahesh Pathak — 2,454 Cases | 2001–2026

⚠ Settlement-pending anomaly: Sai Pushp (43 cases) and Bhagwati Developers (28 cases) have all outcomes recorded as "Settled" yet all cases remain "Pending." Combined with Hagwood Commercial Developers (22 cases, same pattern), approximately 93 cases on Pathak's bench carry a settled outcome without formal closure.

Gautam Chatterjee — 2,151 Cases | 2017–2024

Bombay Dyeing: 2,260-day average — 6.2 years per case. These cases ran longer on average than the RERA Act's entire operational history, and the developer won 65% of contested outcomes. NNP Buildcon: 2,011 days, 95% developer wins. Lavasa: 1,769 days, 100% developer wins. The pattern is consistent — the longest cases before Chatterjee's bench resolved disproportionately in the developer's favour. ⚠ Shivnath Developers: 22 cases all "Settled," all still "Pending."

Ajoy Mehta — 1,684 Cases | 2017–2024

Not a single Review Application before Mehta has ever been disposed. Online Complaints: 1 of 20 ever reached resolution.

⚠ Sai Proviso Home: 15 cases all "Settled," all still "Pending."

B.D. Kapadnis — 748 Cases | 2017–2021

Manoj Saunik — 633 Cases | 2020–2025

The Saunik Anomaly — 62 cases: developer wins on record, cases still open. Adv. Adeeth Nair appears as respondent counsel in 31 cases — all for Rajesh Estates and Nirman Pvt Ltd, filed between March 2022 and June 2024. Every case shows "In favor of Respondent" as outcome. Every case shows "Pending" as status. Durations: 209 to 1,025 days. A second respondent lawyer, S. Parthsarathy, shows an identical pattern in 31 separate cases before the same bench: 100% respondent wins, 100% pending, 715-day average. Total: 62 cases before one currently-active adjudicator carry a developer-favorable outcome while remaining technically open. No homebuyer has received enforceable relief from any of them.

Vasant Prabhu — 381 Cases | 2017–2022

Prabhu's docket: ~295 Non-Compliance Applications (77%), 31 Recovery Warrants (all cleared, 100%), 45 standard Complaints. CCI Projects Private Limited appears in 71 of his 381 cases — 19% of his entire docket. Outcome: 0 complainant wins, 19 respondent wins, 52 settlements, 813-day average. The largest single developer on his bench produced no homebuyer relief across 71 proceedings averaging over two years each.

Ravindra Deshpande — 97 Cases | 2013–2025

Lowest disposal rate (36.1%), smallest docket (97 cases over 12 years), highest pending rate (63.9%). Statistical conclusions are unreliable at this sample size. Fortune Vastushilpa Developers (13 cases) is the only high-volume respondent, with 8 complainant wins and 5 respondent wins.

The Settlement Mirage: Cases That Settled and Never Closed

JRS Associates is the expected pattern: settled and formally closed. The other five developers represent approximately 130 cases where a settlement is on record and the case is still open. Whether the homebuyer received anything from the settlement — and whether it was honoured — is unanswerable from the public record alone.

The Respondent Lawyer Duration Effect

Abir Patel is the dominant respondent-side lawyer in the dataset: 449 appearances, 755-day average (57% above court-wide resolved average of 482 days), 181 developer wins, 159 settlements, 40.8% of cases still pending. Rohit Chavan's 1,467-day average and 68.2% settlement rate suggests extended negotiation — cases run over four years before settling. S. Parthsarathy and Adv. Adeeth Nair: 100% pending, 100% developer wins, all before the same bench.

Developers That Win — Bench-Specific Patterns

Bombay Dyeing's 2,260-day average is the single most extreme duration in the dataset — 6.2 years per case, longer than the RERA Act's entire operational history at the time decisions were made, with the developer winning 65% of decided matters. The pattern is consistent: the longest cases before each bench resolved disproportionately in the developer's favour.

Five Conclusions

The 60-day promise is a fiction across every bench. The fastest high-volume bench (Pathak, 391 days) runs 6.5× over the statutory limit. The slowest (Chatterjee, 1,055 days) runs 17.6× over. For pending cases before Mehta, the average wait has already reached 1,195 days.

Bench assignment is a material determinant of outcome. Kapadnis: 77.7% complainant win rate. Mehta: 51.5%. A 26-percentage-point gap between two benches hearing the same category of cases. The RERA Act provides no mechanism for parties to influence assignment.

Settlement is not always resolution. Approximately 130 cases carry a "Settled" outcome and a "Pending" status simultaneously. Whether those settlements were honoured is not visible in the public record.

Developer win rates are bench-specific, not developer-general. Runwal wins 96% before Mehta and loses elsewhere. CCI Projects wins 100% before Mehta, zero before Prabhu. Merino Builders wins 100% before Saunik. The variable is the bench.

The most structurally concerning currently-active bench is Manoj Saunik's. 88.7% of pending cases waiting over a year. Settlement rate 6.2%. Zero Review or Restoration Applications ever disposed. Sixty-two cases with developer-favorable outcomes still technically open, producing no homebuyer relief despite proceedings averaging 600–1,025 days.

The RERA Act was designed to make real estate justice accessible and fast. The data shows a court under sustained institutional strain: insufficient adjudicator capacity, no mechanism to reassign backlogged cases from departed benches, statistical anomalies the public record cannot explain, and 26,000+ homebuyers still waiting. For them, the numbers are not abstractions. They are a count of days since they filed.

About the Data and Methodology

All 33,805 case records used in this analysis were retrieved from MahaRERA's publicly accessible case portal. Processing through Judge My Lawyer's analytics pipeline involved four key steps. First, adjudicator name consolidation: the same judge may appear under multiple spellings across the source database, and all variants were mapped to a single canonical name before aggregation. Second, duration correction: cases where the filing date and judgment date are identical (zero-duration filings) were excluded from all average resolution time calculations, as these almost certainly reflect data-entry anomalies rather than genuine same-day decisions. Third, outcome standardisation: the outcome field contains dozens of recorded variants and were normalised to three categories — complainant win, respondent win, and settled. Fourth, status-outcome separation: the status field (pending/disposed) and the outcome field are independent in the source system; a case may carry a recorded outcome while remaining technically open. Complainant win rates throughout this report exclude settled matters. Pending case aging is calculated from the filing date to the date of data extraction. All figures are subject to the completeness and accuracy of MahaRERA's own record-keeping.

Disclaimer

The findings in this report are based entirely on publicly available court records as maintained in MahaRERA's case management system and reflect those records as of the date of analysis. Statistical patterns identified — including developer win rates before specific benches, respondent lawyer duration correlations, settlement anomalies, and cases simultaneously carrying a decided outcome and a pending status — describe empirical regularities in the data as recorded. They do not constitute allegations of bias, partiality, misconduct, or wrongdoing against any adjudicator, advocate, developer, or institution. Anomalies noted in this report may reflect administrative recording conventions, interim order documentation practices, data-entry inconsistencies in the source system, or procedural factors not visible in the public record. This report is published for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers with pending matters before MahaRERA or any other tribunal should seek qualified legal counsel before acting on any information contained herein. Judge My Lawyer makes no representation as to the ongoing accuracy of the underlying data, which is subject to revision as MahaRERA updates its case records.