Can Your Society Recover a 10-Year-Old Maintenance Due? The Bombay High Court Said Yes

On 16 January 2026, in Aspandiar Rashid Irani & Anr. v. Pasayadan Cooperative Housing Society Ltd. & Ors. (2026:BHC-AS:1749), Justice Amit Borkar held that unpaid society maintenance is a 'continuing liability', not a one-time debt that goes stale under the Limitation Act, 1963.

The facts were about as extreme as they get. The society's development agreement dated back to 1996, the society itself was formally registered only in 2005, and the recovery notice for dues going back to 2005 wasn't issued until 2023, roughly 18 years of arrears. The defaulters argued limitation. The court disagreed.

The reasoning is worth internalising because it changes how a committee should think about old dues. Maintenance isn't billed once, it's billed every month. Each unpaid month is, in the court's words, a fresh default, so the clock doesn't start ticking on the whole outstanding amount from the first missed payment, it resets with every billing cycle.

The court also pointed to Section 154B-29 of the Maharashtra Co-operative Societies Act as a special, independent recovery mechanism, designed specifically so societies wouldn't be stuck fighting civil-limitation battles for money that's rightfully theirs. A summary recovery route exists precisely so this doesn't become a decade-long court fight.

This isn't a one-case, one-society ruling. Three things from it matter for every RWA and CHS in the state.

• Liability attaches to the flat and to whoever is occupying and using its amenities, not to whichever name happens to be on the share certificate at a given moment. A new owner who bought a flat with unpaid dues attached, or a tenant using the gym, lift and security that maintenance pays for, doesn't get to argue that the debt belongs to the previous person.
• Resale doesn't wipe the ledger clean. A society has real leverage here that many committees forget to use systematically: withholding the No-Objection Certificate for a transfer until dues, including accumulated interest, are cleared.
• 'It's too old to recover' is no longer a valid reason to give up on an outstanding balance. This judgment is now citable authority against that assumption.

Defaulters aren't a rounding error for most societies. A single unit skipping payment in a modestly sized 50-flat society works out to roughly 2% of annual maintenance income gone, enough to delay a lift AMC renewal or force an emergency levy on everyone else to cover the gap.

Multiply that across a handful of chronic defaulters and a treasurer is suddenly juggling deferred repairs against goodwill with vendors who haven't been paid on time. It's one of the most common frustrations committee members bring up, right alongside parking and vendor management, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves because chasing a neighbour for money is socially awkward in a way that filing a complaint about a security lapse isn't.

Committees should read this ruling alongside a separate change: Maharashtra's cap on simple interest for overdue maintenance came down to 12% per annum from the earlier 21% ceiling, effective 30 June 2026. That's still meaningful, interest compounds the pressure to pay promptly, but it means a committee can no longer lean on a punitive interest rate to do the disciplining on its own. The legal clarity on recoverability from the Bombay High Court matters more now, not less.

Stop writing off old dues on the assumption they're time-barred, they very likely aren't, and this judgment is now citable authority for that. Pull out ledgers, even the ones going back years that nobody has looked at since a change in the managing committee, and audit what's genuinely outstanding versus what's been settled but never marked off.

For anything substantial, don't default to a slow civil suit. The summary recovery route under Section 154B-29 exists so a society isn't stuck financing years of litigation to collect money for the lift repair fund.

• Month 1-2: WhatsApp and email nudges, low-friction and automatic.
• Month 3: a registered-post formal reminder.
• Month 4: a formal notice under Section 91 of the MCS Act with a 30-day payment window.
• If it's still unresolved: the co-operative court route. Most undisputed amounts get a summary decree within 60-90 days once filed.

Use the NOC leverage explicitly at the point of resale or transfer rather than as an afterthought, it's the single easiest recovery lever a committee has, and many forget to invoke it consistently.

A defaulter genuinely going through a hard patch and one who's simply gaming the system need different handling, but both need the process applied evenhandedly and on paper, because that documentation is exactly what makes the summary recovery route fast when it comes to that. A society that puts a dated paper trail behind every reminder, not memory and word of mouth, is the one that actually benefits from this ruling instead of just reading about it approvingly and doing nothing.