Realty realities

An event to celebrate the 16th anniversary of ATS, a real estate firm based in the National Capital Region, turned into a public relations event for the developers' fraternity. In his opening remarks, ATS chief Getamber Anand made an impassioned plea to his audience to step into developers' shoes and understand the many unseen challenges and problems they face that cause projects to be delayed. This obviously found little traction with his listeners and someone cynically asked why, in that case, developers transferred funds raised from one project to launch other new projects. Anand's reply said one should not generalise and "we are working on fixing the responsibility". The "we" was the giveaway. Anand is set to become the next President for the Confederation of Real Estate Developers' Associations of India (CREDAI), a real estate developers' forum, so it was no surprise that he used a company event to set the tone for the coming year.