Punjab & Haryana High Court halts new allotments in ₹10,000-crore Gurugram project pending licence probe
Division bench directs Haryana’s Town and Country Planning department to decide plea against IREO Group’s Sector 58 licence transfer by July 20, bars fresh allotments till then
NewsArc Bureau
Chandigarh, July 10, 2026
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has restrained IREO Group and its associate companies from making any fresh allotments in a proposed ₹8,000-10,000 crore residential-cum-commercial project in Sector 58, Gurugram, until the Director, Town and Country Planning (TCP), Haryana, rules on a complaint challenging the legality of the project’s licence.
A division bench of Justice Jasgurpreet Singh Puri and Justice Sanjiv Berry passed the order while disposing of interim applications filed by Advance India Projects Limited in a writ petition against the Director, TCP Haryana, and others, including the IREO Group of companies and a subsequent assignee referred to in the case as respondent No. 14.
Case background
The dispute centres on 14.816 acres of land in Sector 58, Gurugram, where three earlier licences granted between 2009 and 2012 were consolidated into a single licence — Licence No. 69 of 2025 — issued on May 12, 2025, and subsequently approved for transfer to respondent No. 14 on June 17, 2025.
Senior counsel for the petitioner, appearing through Mr. R.S. Rai, Mr. Chetan Mittal and Mr. Nalin Kohli, argued that the original licence was granted in violation of Section 3 of the Haryana Development and Regulation of Urban Areas Act, 1975, since respondent No. 10 — the entity to whom the licence was first issued — was not the owner of the land at the time. The land, it was submitted, had already been transferred to respondent No. 14 nearly a year earlier, in May 2024.
The petitioner contended that a licence issued to a non-owner cannot be validated merely by later transferring it to the actual owner, and that the Director of Town and Country Planning ought to have examined this before granting approval. A representation seeking cancellation of the licence, filed under Section 8 of the 1975 Act, has been pending before the Director since last year.
Respondents’ stand
Senior counsel for the IREO Group and respondent No. 14 — including Mr. Gaurav Chopra, Mr. Akshay Bhan and Mr. Aashish Chopra — argued that the petitioner lacked locus standi, noting that its only real interest stemmed from a 2021 memorandum of understanding that had since fallen through and led to separate commercial litigation. They maintained there was no violation of Foreign Direct Investment policy or any other law, and that any alleged irregularity was, at most, compoundable.
Counsel for the respondents told the court that approximately 350 units have already been allotted under the project, with nearly ₹750 crore collected from allottees, and that respondent No. 14 alone has invested about ₹500 crore. They warned that halting the project further would cause irreparable loss.
The Additional Advocate General for Haryana, Mr. Sandeep Chhabra, informed the bench that the pending representation was listed for hearing on July 20, 2026, and that the State had no objection to a court-fixed timeline for deciding it.
Court’s order
Noting that “a balance is required to be maintained” between facilitating development and protecting the rights of allottees who have already invested in the project, the bench directed the Director, Town and Country Planning to decide the pending representation by July 20, or within a further two weeks on a day-to-day basis if not possible by that date, after hearing all stakeholders and passing a speaking order.
Crucially, the court ordered that no further allotments be made and no new third-party rights be created by the respondents until the representation is decided. The connected application, CM-10442-CWP-2026, will be heard along with the main case, which is listed for August 19, 2026.
