No hostels and poor PGs: inside India’s student housing crisis
A series of fatal accidents in student housing across India has exposed a severe shortage of regulated, safe accommodation for university students. The crisis has forced students into a dangerous shadow rental market characterized by poor infrastructure and lack of oversight.
Why it matters
It highlights a critical failure in urban planning and educational infrastructure that directly threatens the safety of the student population.
When a five-storey building known as “Hostel Daze” came down in Delhi’s Satya Niketan on September 6, 2026, it took less than a minute to kill at least six students and a labourer. The neighbourhood, wedged against Delhi University’s South Campus, has for decades absorbed the students the university itself could not house. Police have registered an FIR against the property’s operators citing culpable homicide and construction negligence, after investigators found the people running the PG knew that the building was in deteriorating condition and made no repairs.
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It raises a question: was Satya Niketan a singular disaster, or the visible edge of something larger? Interviews with students living hundreds of kilometers away, in cities across India, suggest the latter.
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