How Housejoy got lost

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Editor's note: On the phone, Vinay sounds distraught. A Bengaluru resident, Vinay has been waiting for a year and a half to get his duplex house built. But in all this time, not a single brick has been laid. And the company responsible for the same is the home services startup Housejoy. In December 2019, Vinay and his brother had answered an ad by Housejoy. “We gave them a call and eventually, signed an agreement for building a duplex house within nine months for about Rs 60 lakh,” he says. “We were told that Housejoy will be taking care of the entire process and all we had to do was make payments on time.” Cut to June 2021: “There was no clarity on the starting date of the project. We were asked for money for materials and manpower, but discovered that no work had commenced. The contractors assigned kept changing and complaining about the lack of payment. Even a shed on the site was not pulled down,” says Vinay.  Housejoy, on the other hand, blamed the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and multiple other …