dhruv
I’m a researcher and writer interested in politics, history, media, and contemporary affairs. My work focuses on digging into facts, examining narratives, and understanding the ideas and events shaping India and its public discourse.
On Sunday evenings, we relax, enjoy ourselves, and feel a little stressed about going back to college or school, the next day. But last Sunday, it wasn’t the same for everyone. A five-storey building, functioning as a paying guest accommodation (PG) in South-West Delhi’s Satya Niketan came down. By Monday afternoon, the death toll had increased to seven, with twelve people pulled out alive as the National Disaster Response Force and Delhi Fire Services teams kept clearing debris.
An 18-year-old from Katni, Madhya Pradesh, who had moved to Delhi hoping to become an IAS officer, died because of the collapse of an illegally constructed PG building in Satya Niketan. On paper, the building was not supposed to exist as it did. It stood on a 55-square-yard plot, was roughly 50 years old, and had been permitted for only a ground-plus-structure.
Yet, four floors had gone up over the years, with unauthorised alterations to the basement and around 15 rooms that held two to three students each, mostly from Kerala, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, studying at Motilal Nehru College, Atma Ram Sanatan Dharm College, and Sri Venkateswara College nearby. This single building is a data point inside a much larger number, and that number is what makes this a systematic story of an ongoing problem rather than an isolated tragedy.
According to reports, the Delhi government estimates that 200,000 PG accommodations are operating across Mukherjee Nagar, Laxmi Nagar, and Rajendra Nagar alone, with no records maintained by any authority. These figures come from the draft of a new bill the Delhi government is preparing as a direct response to this collapse. The bill is titled “the Paying Accommodation Regulation and Safety Bill, 2026”, which describes the PG sector bluntly as “a housing market operating largely without a regulatory framework”.
Two hundred thousand unregistered PGs are not an abstraction, they are a hard governance gap when you compare it to what enforcement has actually delivered. According to the MCD Commissioner Sanjeev Khirwar, in the three months before this collapse, the corporation carried out 960 demolitions, sealed 407 buildings, and served notices to roughly 1,500 more for sealing or demolition, which he described as routine enforcement against unauthorised construction.
Set that 1,500 notice figure against 200,000 estimated PGs in just three neighbourhoods, and the enforcement rate works out to under 1% of the unregistered stock being touched by any notice in a full quarter. Even before accounting for how many of those 1,500 notices actually ended in a demolished or vacated building rather than an appeal that stalled the clock.
Delhi is not the only city that has tried and failed to get a handle on this. In Gurugram, the Municipal Corporation identified around 3000 illegal PG accommodations out of an estimated 5000 operating in the city and served the notice on 1,700 of them, demanding registration or closure. The result: just 10 PG premises were actually registered, while the rest kept generating income while bypassing mandatory taxes. Bengaluru’s BBMP has around 2,500 PGs registered against an industry estimate of 10,000 operating in the city. It means roughly three out of four Bengaluru PGs sit outside the formal system.
The pattern across all three cities is the same and tells a story: announce the crackdown or, in simple words, let the number die, making it news, issue thousands of notices, and register almost nobody. What “unregulated” actually means on the ground, Delhi doesn’t have to imagine; even what an unregulated PG hub looks like before something goes wrong, it already has a data point.
After a fire broke out in a Mukherjee Nagar PG in September 2023, a survey found 104 PG units operating in violation of building bylaws. Of all the establishments surveyed, only one had a Delhi Fire Services No-Objection Certificate.
That’s the coaching-hub economy in miniature: a neighbourhood packed with paying tenants and functionally no fire clearance across the board.
The law that exists and how slowly it moves: Delhi does have a legal mechanism specifically built to stop a dangerous building before it kills anyone. According to Section 348 of the DMC Act, 1957, the commissioner(or an executive engineer acting on delegated authority) declares a building “ruinous” or “dangerous” and orders it demolished, repaired, or secured, with a compliance window of three days. That’s exactly what happened to House No. 13, Satya Niketan, the building next door to the one that collapsed. Its beam structure had weakened. MCD issued the Section 348 notice on September 6, giving the owner three days to demolish voluntarily or have MCD do it and bill the cost as property tax arrears. But here is a catch: these orders are quasi-judicial, and an owner can appeal to the Appellate Tribunal MCD, a body headed by a serving or retired District Judge. That’s a legitimate legal safeguard against arbitrary demolition.
In practice, it is also a route through which a flagged building can remain occupied and still collect rent for months while a case is pending. The notice that matters most in this story is the one that came only after the collapse, for the building next door, not the one that fell.
Someone has to die for the system to wake up. A few days later, it goes back to sleep. These lines tell a lot about the MCD and its actions after the Satya Niketan incident. The building collapse led to accountability; the Delhi Police filed an FIR under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita against the owner, identified as Hariram Bansal, on charges including culpable homicide and negligence. He went underground; police issued a notice and deployed ten teams before catching him in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan, about a day later.
Not only that, five MCD officials from the South Zone were suspended, including the Deputy Commissioner, Superintending Engineer, Executive Engineer (Building), Assistant Engineer (Building), and Junior Engineer (Building). Chief Minister Rekha Gupta ordered a magisterial inquiry and directed MCD to take “stringent action” against ongoing illegal construction, while also convening MLAs and MPs to monitor unauthorised construction in their own areas. Lieutenant Governor Taranjit Singh Sandhu went further and ordered structural audits of all buildings in every PG hub across Delhi within one week.
A separate district magistrate and police committee has been tasked with proactively reaching out to students living in PGs, hearing grievances, and building a database, an implicit admission that no such database currently exists.
None of these steps explains why a building with no sanctioned plan and illegal basement work was still standing, occupied, and collecting rent the week it fell. What they do explain is the shape of the response every time this happens: fast, visible, and entirely reactive. Unfortunately, Delhi has been here before, repeatedly. This isn’t Satya Niketan’s first building collapse, and it isn’t Delhi’s either.
There’s no unified government count of Delhi’s building collapses. The fire department data lumps full collapses in with fallen walls and balconies, inflating raw numbers without telling you how many buildings actually came down. The image above lists separately documented, named collapses from 2010 to 2026 with a confirmed date, location, and death toll: 33 incidents, 187 combined deaths, and almost certainly an undercount.
Delhi University has more than 7 lakh students enrolled across its regular, professional, and open-learning programmes, with roughly 2.5 lakh registered in conventional programmes in 2024–25 alone. In simple words, half of DU’s total enrolment, an estimated 3.5 lakh students, are the ones who come from outside Delhi and need somewhere to live, but if we talk about the university’s capacity, it sits somewhere between 7000 and 9000 beds, depending on which count you use.
Actually, there are precise hostel-capacity figures available on the Internet; many news websites quoted the numbers from 7000 to 9000, which works out to roughly one hostel bed for every 28 to 31 students. In one recent hostel application cycle, more than 30,000 undergraduates applied for a seat; fewer than 1 in 10 got one.
The comparison that stings most: JNU houses 55–65% of its own students in hostels, and Jamia Millia Islamia houses around 15%. DU houses roughly 1%. Despite this, section 33 of the Delhi University Act, 1922, states that students should reside in a college, hall, or university-approved housing, a legal expectation the university’s own infrastructure has never come close to meeting. UPSC adds a second, harder filter on top of the housing one. Roughly 5 to 6 lakh candidates actually sit the Civil Services prelims each year, competing for fewer than 1,000 vacancies, odds of roughly 1 in 600. Old Rajinder Nagar exists because hundreds of thousands of people fail that filter every single year and try again, often for multiple attempts, all while needing a bed and a library seat within walking distance of a coaching institute.
Put the two filters together, and the shape of the crisis becomes obvious: Delhi runs two of the most oversubscribed selection systems in the country, where a university has 30 applicants for every leftover seat, and a civil services exam that rejects 599 out of every 600 people who sit it and expects a housing market built for a fraction of that number to somehow absorb everyone left standing. It doesn’t. It just goes underground, one converted basement at time.
While researching the challenges faced by PG students, we talked to a UPSC aspirant named Akriti, who spent a year in Old Rajinder Nagar preparing for competitive exams. She describes a pattern that lines up almost exactly with the aggregate data above: high rent for very little in return, and safety treated as an afterthought even after a tragedy made the risk unmistakable.
Rent for a small, poorly equipped room ran ₹10,000 to ₹12,000 a month, and the rooms themselves were often too small to properly fit a bed, table, and cupboard together. There are also basement libraries. These are desk spaces in the basement of the house provided to the students so they can study peacefully. The price of these basement seats used to be ₹1,200–1,300 per month but jumped to a starting range of roughly ₹3,000 after the Rau’s IAS Study Circle basement flooding killed three UPSC aspirants in July 2024. The price of a basement seat roughly doubled or tripled overnight. According to Akriti, the actual safety conditions inside those basements didn’t improve to match. Rent went up. Vigilance didn’t.
The complaints stack up into a familiar list: PG owners rarely checked in on students or fixed problems quickly. Plumbing, electricity, bathroom, and cooler repairs were routinely delayed. Ventilation was poor, and natural light was scarce in most rooms. On top of the base rent, students paid extra for electricity, water, and maintenance charges that were often unclear or inconsistently applied.
Before any of that, there was the upfront cost of just finding a room at all: brokerage fees and security deposits paid to middlemen who controlled access to the city’s tightest rental market. And running through all of it, the same structural risks this piece has been tracing at the city-wide level: fire safety, emergency exits, drainage, and flooding, remained live concerns at the level of an individual room, not just a headline statistic.
None of this is unique to one person’s bad luck with one landlord. It’s what the ₹5,000–₹18,000 range cited earlier in this piece actually buys, and what “no rent-control framework” and “no dedicated fire safety authority” to check these ‘rooms’ too small for even their furniture.
Delhi has no rent-control framework for PG accommodation and no per-bed ceiling. Pricing is set entirely by demand, which is why ₹20,000–₹25,000 a month per bed is unremarkable near coaching hubs and universities. In Old Rajinder Nagar specifically, shared rooms run ₹5,000–₹18,000 a month depending on occupancy density; private rooms run ₹20,000–₹29,000 or more.
The income calculations clearly illustrate the financial incentive. According to the reports on the collapsed building, it describes roughly 60 beds across 20 rooms at ₹12,000 per bed with an estimated income of ₹7 to ₹7.5 lakh in rent every month from a single converted house. That is not a homeowner renting a spare room. That is a commercial operation run out of a structure never approved to hold it, and it explains why an owner might rather fight a demolition order at the Appellate Tribunal than comply with one.
Amidst the talk of illegal constructions, bureaucratic scrambles and the belated formation of committees, a crucial element of the story remains conspicuously absent: the actual physics of the collapse. A building does not fall just because it was constructed without obtaining necessary permissions; such collapses are caused by structural weaknesses, natural elements, human actions and other such actual physical factors.
The Satya Niketan property was a load-bearing brick structure entirely devoid of a Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) frame. There were no pillars or beams to distribute the immense weight of the four upper storeys. Instead, the entire vertical load was transferred downward through ageing brick walls. Buildings with load-bearing brick walls are not uncommon; this was a widely used method before the advent of RCC and steel building technology. But in the case of such buildings, one thing is crucial and must always be remembered: the brick walls are bearing the load of the entire building.
In an RCC framed building, removing a wall merely removes a partition, it does not make the structure weak. But in a load-bearing structure where the brick walls bear the entire load of the floors above it, removing a wall is like removing one or more columns of an RCC building. Yet, this is precisely what occurred. Unregulated construction work was underway in the basement and ground floor, and a critical ground-floor wall was removed to create more space for a shop. This means the load was shifted to other walls, and as a result, the balance of the building shifted, causing it to tilt and collapse.
This fatal miscalculation was compounded by subterranean rot. Continued rains in the preceding days had led to severe waterlogging in the basement. Prolonged standing water quietly eroded the soil beneath the foundation and softened the decades-old binding mortar, fundamentally weakening the ground upon which the heavily overloaded structure stood.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated anomaly. The broader Satya Niketan region—much like other urban villages catering to Delhi University and UPSC students—is a labyrinth of such aging, brick-only buildings. Originally constructed decades ago to support just one or two storeys, these non-RCC structures have suffered rampant, unsanctioned vertical overloading as owners relentlessly stack additional floors to maximize their PG rental yields.
When you combine heavy monsoon seepage, unchecked basement excavations, and brick-only foundations groaning under the weight of illegal floors, the result is hardly an accident. It is a mathematical certainty—a disaster already hardwired into the masonry of the neighbourhood, waiting for the final, fatal blow. Even if there is no removal of a wall, the brick-and-mortar walls can become weak over time, and give way to the load above. Such buildings are also more vulnerable to events like earthquakes.
After the collapse, the authorities have finally realised the problem, and have started identifying buildings with more than four storeys with load-bearing brick walls, and demolishing those identified marked as Vulnerable or Dangerous.
The Paying Guest Accommodation Regulation and Safety Bill, 2026, is the most concrete regulatory response yet, and its provisions map directly onto every failure point already laid out in this piece. PG operators would need a mandatory operating licence within 90 days from local zone authorities, backed by police verification, a No-Objection Certificate, and municipal clearance covering both structural and fire safety. A new public portal called GovPG would list every registered PG along with occupancy numbers and audit dates in a database that, as of today, simply doesn’t exist.
The bill also proposes zone-wise rent bands, set by a Rent Regulation Committee based on market rates and amenities, a direct response to the kind of scarcity-driven pricing seen throughout Old Rajinder Nagar. Security deposits would be capped at three months’ rent and returned within 30 days except in cases of documented misconduct. Every PG would need mandatory CCTV at entrances and common areas, and any facility housing 15 or more students would require a licensed night security guard between 10 pm and 6 am. To sweeten compliance rather than only punish non-compliance, the bill also dangles incentives: property-tax rebates, easier loans for safety upgrades, and a “Certified Student-Friendly PG” recognition for operators who register.
Even the bill’s own drafters acknowledge the obvious problem. As Jagdish Mamgain, an urban planning expert and former MCD works committee chairman, put it: norms don’t mean much without the equipment and coordination to enforce them, especially across a city where enforcement power is split between agencies that don’t control each other. Delhi has written rules like this before. What it has never had is a working answer to Mamgain’s question.
Every response so far, the FIR, the suspensions, even the new bill, treats this as an enforcement problem: catch more violators, register more PGs, and audit more buildings. That’s necessary, but it’s aimed at the supply side of an equation this piece has already shown is driven just as much by demand. As long as Delhi keeps 3.5 lakh outstation DU students and lakhs of more coaching aspirants competing for a housing stock built for a fraction of that number, enforcement alone will keep failing the same way it has for 16 years and 33 collapses. Because someone will always find it more profitable to build past the sanctioned floor than to leave that demand unmet.
The more durable fix is urban planning, not just policing. Delhi’s own hostel data makes the shape of the problem obvious: JNU houses over half its students, and DU houses about 1%. That gap didn’t emerge because DU couldn’t have built more hostels, but it emerged because the university, MCD, and DDA never planned for the outstation population DU itself was recruiting.
Purpose-built student housing near coaching and university hubs, which the kind of cities like Pune and Bengaluru have piloted with private-public partnerships, could absorb a meaningful share of this demand without needing a single new illegal basement. Similarly, easing floor-area and height restrictions specifically for licensed, fire-cleared student housing near recognised institutions rather than leaving every operator to break the rules quietly would let supply legally catch up to where the demand already is.
There’s also a decentralisation argument worth making. Old Rajinder Nagar and Mukherjee Nagar are as crowded as they are largely because the big coaching institutes cluster there, and everything else like PGs, libraries, food stalls, clusters around them in turn. A few state governments have experimented with subsidising coaching infrastructure in tier-2 cities specifically to pull some of that pressure away from Delhi and Kota. It hasn’t solved the core problem yet anywhere it’s been tried, but it points at the same underlying idea: enforcement can catch violators one building at a time, but only better urban planning changes how many buildings need catching in the first place.
Seven students are dead because a housing shortage that Delhi has known about for decades met an aloof and clueless enforcement system that only ever shows up after the damage is done. The notice came for the building next door, not the one that fell. The bill is still a draft, not a law. And the 200,000 rooms this piece keeps returning to are still standing, still unregistered, still full. Fixing that isn’t a matter of writing better rules; Delhi has tried that since 1993. It’s a matter of building enough legal beds that the illegal ones stop being the only option. Until that math changes, the next collapse isn’t a possibility, but an inevitability.
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