Overview Snapshot
A Maharashtra housing society committee is elected from among registered flat owners for a five year term. Section 154B-23 of the MCS Act sets the exact grounds for disqualification, defaulting on dues, running a flat business within the society, misconduct, or other statutory violations, some of which have led to real, litigated removals.(1)
- Only the primary member named first on the share certificate can normally contest elections or hold office
- Section 154B-23 lists specific, statutory disqualification grounds, not a vague misconduct standard
- A member disqualified under most of these grounds is barred from re-election, re-co-option, or re-nomination for five years
- Mid-term vacancies are filled by co-option, capped at one third of committee strength, for the remainder of the original term only
- A real 2026 Mulund case shows a full committee, chairman, secretary, and treasurer, disqualified together for withholding member documents
The Question Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud
A treasurer has fallen three months behind on their own maintenance payments. Meanwhile, they’re still signing off on society checks, still approving vendor payments, still sitting at the head of the table during budget discussions. Everyone in the building notices. Nobody says anything, because raising it means calling out to a neighbour, someone whose kids play with your kids, someone you’ll see in the lift tomorrow.
Eventually a member asks the question out loud at a general body meeting. Is a defaulting treasurer even legally allowed to be handling the society’s money right now. The answer isn’t a matter of opinion or house custom. It sits in Section 154B-23 of the Maharashtra Co-operative Societies Act, a specific, written list of disqualification grounds, not a vague standard left to interpretation. This piece walks through who’s actually eligible to serve, what each committee role does, exactly what disqualifies someone under the law, and a real case from 2026 that shows precisely how far this can go when it’s ignored.
Who Can Become a Committee Member?
Eligibility generally requires being a registered flat owner, current on society dues, and the primary member whose name appears first on the share certificate.
Why Associate Members Generally Can’t Contest
Associate members, typically a spouse or family member added to a flat’s registration, can participate in society life and attend meetings, but standing for the committee or holding an office like Chairman generally requires the primary member’s explicit written consent, and even then, only where the society’s own bye-laws specifically permit it. A society’s bye-laws are the deciding document here, not assumption or informal practice.
Age and Membership Status
Beyond ownership status, a candidate needs to be an adult member in good standing, with no active disqualification against them, a status that, as the rest of this piece covers, can change mid-term without anyone formally announcing it.
Committee Member Designations and What Each Role Does
Three core roles anchor most committees, each carrying a distinct function beyond the title.
Chairman
The Chairman oversees the committee’s overall functioning, resolves internal disputes, and is generally responsible for ensuring the society operates within its bye-laws and the broader cooperative framework.
Secretary
The Secretary manages day-to-day administration, official correspondence, statutory record-keeping, and coordination with external authorities, municipal bodies, the Registrar’s office, or empanelled auditors, when required.
Treasurer
The Treasurer manages the society’s finances directly, maintenance collection, financial ledgers, budget preparation, and coordination with the statutory auditor. It’s also, not coincidentally, the role where a defaulter disqualification creates the most obvious conflict of interest, someone managing money while themselves behind on paying into the same fund.
What Are the Grounds for Disqualification Under Section 154B-23?
The Act sets out specific, enumerated grounds, not a general “misconduct” standard a Registrar interprets case by case. Section 154B-23(1) disqualifies a person from being appointed, nominated, elected, or co-opted to a committee if they are a defaulter of any society, if they carry on a business of letting, subletting, or selling flats within the housing society of which they’re a member, if they’ve been held responsible under Sections 79, 88, 154B-8(2), or 154B-27, or for the cost of an enquiry under Section 85, if they’ve incurred any disqualification under the Act or its rules generally, or if they trigger a disqualification similar to specific clauses of Section 73CA(1)(f).
The “Defaulter” Ground, and Where “Three Months” Actually Comes From
This is worth being precise about, since it gets repeated online as if it’s written directly into Section 154B-23. It isn’t. The Act itself simply disqualifies “a defaulter of any society,” without stating a specific time period. The commonly cited three month figure comes from how individual society by-laws typically define what counts as a defaulter, not from a number fixed in the statute. A society’s own bye-laws are what actually pin down the exact threshold, which means it’s worth checking your specific society’s definition rather than assuming a blanket rule applies everywhere identically.
Conflict of Interest, Running a Flat Business Within the Society
Section 154B-23(1)(ii) disqualifies anyone conducting a business of letting, subletting, or selling flats within their own society. The logic is straightforward, a committee member profiting from flat transactions inside the very community they’re meant to be governing on behalf of everyone else is a direct conflict, and the law treats it as disqualifying on its own, without needing to prove any specific harm resulted.
The Disqualification Ground Almost Nobody Expects
Section 154B-23(1)(v) imports disqualifications from clauses (vii), (viii), and (ix) of Section 73CA(1)(f), a cross reference that sounds bureaucratic until you see what it’s actually been used for. In a 2024 case, Pawankumar Nandkishor Singh versus State of Maharashtra, a committee member was disqualified specifically for having more than two children, under this exact chain of provisions. The petitioner argued this provision shouldn’t apply to housing society committees at all, since Chapter XIII-B, the section of the Act specifically governing housing societies, excludes Section 73CA elsewhere. The Bombay High Court disagreed and upheld the disqualification. It’s an unusual example, and worth knowing exists, precisely because almost nobody expects family size to be a legally relevant fact for committee eligibility.(2)
The Five Year Bar on Re-Election
A member disqualified under clauses (ii), (iii), (iv), or (v) of Section 154B-23(1), that covers the flat business conflict, prior responsibility findings, general disqualifications, and the Section 73CA import, cannot be re-elected, re-co-opted, or re-nominated to any committee for five years from the date they ceased to be a member. This isn’t a symbolic penalty. It’s a hard statutory bar with a specific, real world consequence, as the next section shows directly.
What Happens When a Member Is Disqualified? A Real 2026 Example
The typical path runs from a member’s complaint, through a show cause process, to a formal disqualification order from the Deputy Registrar.
The Mulund Case
A 2026 Mulund matter involving Sachin Co-operative Housing Society Ltd. and member Sadanand Manekar illustrates the type of dispute that can arise when members seek statutory documents. The matter is recorded in the Maharashtra State Cooperative Appellate Court listings.(3) The trigger was a member, Sadanand Manekar, requesting financial records for the 2023-24 fiscal year and not receiving them within the 45 day period mandated under Section 154B-8. Even after 90 days, the documents still hadn’t been provided. Deputy Registrar MB Mhaske found the committee had failed its legal duty and issued the disqualification order.
What makes this case worth remembering isn’t just the outcome, it’s how ordinary the trigger was. Nobody accused the committee of financial fraud or major misconduct. A member asked for documents the law entitles them to see, the committee dragged its feet past the deadline, and the consequence was the entire leadership disqualified together, for five years, over a document request.
Can a Disqualification Be Appealed?
Yes. A member disqualified under Section 154B-23 can generally approach the Deputy Registrar or the Cooperative Court, depending on the stage and nature of the original order, to challenge the decision. The appeal process reviews the same facts the original order was based on, so a society or member facing this route needs the underlying documentation to actually be in order, not assembled hastily after the fact.
Filling a Vacant Committee Seat
When a seat opens up, whether through resignation, disqualification, or another vacancy, the usual path is co-option, filling the seat for the remainder of the original term rather than a fresh one. Co-option is capped at not more than one third of total committee strength, a limit worth checking against, since a committee that’s leaned on co-option repeatedly to fill several vacancies can quietly exceed that cap without anyone doing the math.
What If the Whole Committee Isn’t Functioning?
Sometimes the problem isn’t one disqualified member, it’s a committee that’s stopped functioning altogether, through mismanagement, an unresolved dispute, or a broader breakdown in elected strength. That scenario, including the currently unsettled question of what happens when a committee’s elected strength itself falls below the required two thirds threshold, a matter presently under Supreme Court review following a stayed Bombay High Court ruling, deserves its own detailed treatment. It’s covered in a separate piece on dissolving or removing a non-functional committee.
When Nobody Wants to Be the One Who Raises It
A treasurer has been three months behind on personal maintenance payments for a while, and continues signing off on society expenditure the entire time. Everyone on the committee has noticed. Nobody has said anything, because pointing it out feels like accusing a neighbour rather than flagging a legal problem. When a member finally raises it formally, the committee realizes there’s no clean record of exactly when the treasurer’s dues crossed into default, or when anyone first noticed, which makes the whole situation harder to resolve cleanly than it needed to be.
A professionally managed society avoids this by tracking defaulter status against every committee member systematically, as a matter of routine record keeping, not waiting for an uncomfortable resident to be the one who finally says something months into a clear statutory issue.
Committee Responsibility vs Professional Execution
| Aspect | Committee Alone | Professional Management Support |
| Tracking member defaulter status | Informal, noticed only if someone raises it | Checked systematically against every committee member |
| Disqualification documentation | Assembled reactively once a complaint is filed | Maintained continuously, ready if a challenge arises |
| Co-option process | Handled informally, sometimes exceeding the one third cap without realizing it | Tracked against the statutory cap and term limits |
| Appeal readiness | Scrambled together after an order is issued | Documented from the point an issue is first identified |
| Resident confidence | Erodes when the committee’s own standing is unclear | Builds when eligibility and conduct are demonstrably tracked |
A Practical Framework for Keeping Committee Eligibility Clean
- Confirm every current committee member’s dues status against the society’s own bye-law definition of defaulter, not an assumed three month rule of thumb
- Check whether any committee member runs a flat letting, subletting, or selling business within the society, a direct conflict under Section 154B-23(1)(ii)
- Review whether any member has been held responsible under Sections 79, 88, 154B-8(2), or 154B-27 in a prior proceeding
- Confirm co-opted members don’t collectively exceed one third of total committee strength
- Track each co-opted member’s term as coterminous with the committee’s own term, not a fresh independent one
- Document any disqualification concern in writing as soon as it’s identified, not only once a formal complaint has been filed
- Confirm the five year re-election bar is being correctly applied to anyone previously disqualified under the relevant clauses
Where This Actually Gets Handled Properly
Eligibility and disqualification are not difficult to check individually, but the real governance risk is allowing small issues to go unchecked because nobody is actively responsible for reviewing them. In a volunteer committee, questioning a colleague’s defaulter status or an ineligible co-option can also become personally uncomfortable. Eligibility to contest elections or hold office depends on the member’s status under the applicable provisions of the Maharashtra Co-operative Societies Act, the Rules and the society’s bye-laws, including specific provisions that may apply to associate members.
That is why committee eligibility should be treated as an ongoing governance responsibility, not an election-time formality. At Tick Boxes, our role is to bring professional management and continuity to this process. Society managers handle the day-to-day execution and follow-through, supported by our in-house accounting and audit team where statutory and financial review is required.
The committee remains responsible for governance and decisions. Our job is to make sure those decisions are properly executed, documented and followed through, with potential compliance issues brought to the committee’s attention before they become larger problems.
Technology can help keep records accurate, organised and auditable. But effective governance still depends on people who understand the applicable rules, review what is happening and take responsibility for execution.
If your committee has not reviewed its current eligibility status against Section 154B-23 recently, the question is not simply whether the records are in order. It is whether the society’s governance process can withstand scrutiny when someone actually checks.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Can a disqualified member be re-elected later?
Generally not immediately. A member disqualified under most of Section 154B-23’s grounds is barred from being re-elected, re-co-opted, or re-nominated to the committee for five years from the date the disqualification took effect.
2. How long can a co-opted member serve?
A co-opted member serves only for the remainder of the original term they’re filling, not a fresh term of their own, and their appointment ends when the current committee’s term ends.
3. What are the grounds for disqualification under Section 154B-23?
The grounds include being a defaulter of the society, running a business of letting, subletting, or selling flats within the same society, having been held responsible under specific other sections of the Act, and certain disqualifications imported from Section 73CA(1)(f).
4. Can a disqualification order be appealed?
Yes. A disqualified member can generally approach the Deputy Registrar or the Cooperative Court to challenge the order, depending on the stage and nature of the original decision.
5. Is running a flat rental business within your own society a disqualification ground? Yes. Section 154B-23(1)(ii) specifically disqualifies a committee member who carries on a business of letting, subletting, or selling flats within the housing society of which they are a member.
Sources & Citation:
Add comment