But Mr. Pandey said in an interview: “They promised heaven to all the buyers.”

Naveen Verma, an Indian who works in a technology job in Scotland, said he bought a Parklands lot in 2006. Mr. Verma, who said he had invested more than $90,000 in his property, provided The Times with dozens of emails to BPTP asking for possession. Mr. Verma said he had been promised a swimming pool and Wi-Fi connectivity in a gated community, but none of that had materialized. Instead, local villagers were using the site to dry cow manure for fuel when he last visited in December 2013.

In 2014, Mr. Verma went to court and BPTP agreed to turn over the lot to him, although he said there was little he could do with the property at this point. In a statement, the company said that no road had been built to Mr. Verma’s property because the government had been unable to acquire the necessary land, blaming “encroachment by some local villagers.”

One villager, a retired electrical worker named Ram Kishan, whose home is near Mr. Verma’s lot, says he will not leave the settlement. “I told them this is the land of my forefathers and we have been living here for over 150 years,” Mr. Kishan said, speaking in Hindi about visitors to the site who told him he had to leave. “How can I run away from the village of my ancestors? The whole world is building their homes around our village.”

A Purchase in Manhattan

By the summer of 2011, as Mr. Chawla fended off criticism back home, a buyer expressed an interest in Apartment 68AF in the Time Warner Center.

The resulting cash offer of $19.4 million was more than $7 million below the asking price for the apartment, which encompasses five and a half marble baths, a 23-by-24-foot great room, his-and-her master closets and river-to-river views of the city.