Among Indian cricketers MS Dhoni is the biggest brand and he charges the highest amount for appearing in a TV commercial or a print advertisement. One of his many clients is the Amrapali Group, a real estate firm.
One of Amrapali’s many projects in National Capital Region (NCR), the Sapphire complex in Noida, a residential project, is making news for the wrong reason these days. The residents of the said complex are protesting against the builder for not fulfilling its promises and have opened a Twitter campaign against the Amrapali Group.
Since Dhoni is their brand ambassador, the residents are also tagging him in their tweets, requesting the Indian captain to help them. Some residents have asked Dhoni to tell the firm to complete their project using the hashtag ‘AmrapaliMisuseDhoni’, which went viral in no time and as many as 70,000 tweets flooded the social media.
“We also tagged UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav asking him to intervene. Twitter #AmrapaliMisuseDhoni saw a total of 70000 impressions and our campaign forced the realtor and the Noida authority to address the issue of buyers,” a dejected retired naval officer RK Srivastava, one of the investors of the project, was quoted as saying by crictracker.com.
The Amrapali group had launched the Sapphire, a project with 1000 flats spread across an area of over 40000 sq. metres, way back in 2009. It was promised that the houses would be handed over in 2011. The project attracted a lot of investors, including some famous names like Justice Markandey Katju and vice admiral (retired) Shekhar Sinha.
But the project wasn’t delivered even after a two-year delay and the residents had to shift to the houses without the occupation certificate in 2014. Since then, the residents have been complaining about the failed lifts, incidents of fire, poor parking facility etc.
The Noida authority has now assured that it would call the builder and buyers to address their issues. Amidst such situation, the executive director of Amrapali Group said, “We will deposit Rs 15 crore (to issue the occupation certificate from Noida authority) and take the occupation certificate in 60 days. Other issues will also be resolved.”