PROJECT-WISE RESOLUTION OR JUDICIAL OVERREACH? TESTING THE STATUTORY VALIDITY OF ‘REVERSE CIRP’ IN REAL ESTATE INSOLVENCIES

Reverse corporate insolvency resolution process (‘Reverse CIRP’) is a judicially fashioned mechanism under which the promoter of a distressed real estate corporate debtor is permitted to remain outside the committee of creditors and fund a stalled project as a lender, so that allottees obtain possession without the induction of a third-party resolution applicant. Conceived by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal in 2020 to rescue a single housing project, the doctrine has since been invoked, qualified, and in places rejected by tribunals across the country, generating sustained uncertainty about its statutory foundation. This paper asks whether Reverse CIRP is a legitimate purposive construction of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, or an unauthorised judicial reconstruction of its architecture. Using doctrinal and statutory-interpretive methods, it tests the doctrine against the provisions governing moratorium, resolution-professional control, promoter eligibility, and creditor equality, and argues that it cannot be reconciled with the Code’s textual design, that its survival depends on unanimous consent rather than statutory entitlement, and that recent legislative and regulatory movement toward codified, professional-administered project-wise resolution vindicates rather than answers the overreach critique.