We will roll out a massive Low cost Housing programme to ensure that by the time the nation completes 75 years of its Independence, every family will have a pucca house of its own. It will be an innovatively designed scheme that dovetails various existing programmes and also encourages the housing sector by appropriate policy interventions and credit availability including interest subventions, where necessary.

This entry was imported as a 2014 promise to "regulate real estate developers and protect homebuyers". We read the manifesto's housing chapter. It promises a low-cost housing programme with a 2022 deadline, and adds that the scheme "encourages the housing sector by appropriate policy interventions and credit availability including interest subventions". There is no commitment to a regulator, and no mention of a real estate regulation Act. A Real Estate Bill had in fact been introduced by the previous government in 2013 and was pending when the manifesto was written.

The Act came anyway, and it matters. The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 was passed in March 2016 and brought into force in May 2017. It requires developers to register projects before advertising, to keep 70 per cent of buyer money in a project-specific escrow account, to disclose plans and timelines, and to compensate buyers for delay — the first serious statutory protection Indian homebuyers had. Its enactment falls within the term, and on the manifesto's broader promise of "appropriate policy interventions" for the housing sector, it counts.

Whether it works is the question this fact-check cannot answer, and the reason is worth setting out.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs was asked five direct questions on 30 July 2026: whether implementation and enforcement had been reviewed; what steps ensure "timely resolution of disputes, enforcement of penalties and recovery of compensation"; what transparency mechanisms exist for project registration, escrow monitoring and disclosure; whether staffing and technical capacity of state RERA authorities had been reviewed; and how strengthening implementation would restore homebuyer confidence.

The reply opens by establishing that "'Land' and 'Colonization' are State subjects" under Entry 18 of the State List, and that the Act was enacted using Concurrent List entries. Everything that follows is about the architecture of the law rather than its performance. No national count of registered projects. No count of complaints filed or decided. No figure for compensation ordered, and none for compensation actually recovered — which is the number that would show whether an order from a state authority is worth anything. No assessment of vacancies in the authorities and tribunals that decide these cases.

The constitutional position is accurate: each state runs its own authority, and several have been criticised for delay, under-staffing and orders that go unenforced. But a central Act creates a central interest in knowing whether it functions, and the ministry that administers it publishes no consolidated picture.

That is why the accuracy here is recorded as unverifiable rather than graded. The law exists and was passed in the term; its effect on homebuyers is not measured in any document we hold.