Mainstream WeeklyDelhi University houses one student in a hundred. JNU houses two in three. Seven students died in Satya Niketan because the state chose the first number.
On a quiet Sunday afternoon in September 2026, a five-storey building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan collapsed like a house of cards. Inside, dozens of students were studying, sleeping, living. When the dust settled, at least seven were dead. The building was 50 years old, with walls just four inches thick and no pillars for support, and it was called Hostel Daze. It was not a hostel. It was a death trap.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi had vacated this building last year because it was dilapidated. Then it granted permission to run a PG anyway. The building was registered in the name of Urmila, aged 75. Her 81-year-old husband Hariram Gupta, a retired Air Force sergeant, and their 52-year-old son Mahesh ran the paying guest accommodation, and all three have since been arrested on charges that include culpable homicide. Renovation of the basement had been going on for months. Water had been accumulating there for days. The foundation was already weak. The building was permitted for Ground plus 1. It was built to Ground plus 4. No building plan was ever approved. No fire safety certificate was required, because the building was below 15 metres, and Delhi’s rules simply do not apply below that height. No licence was required to run a PG in the first place, a regulatory vacuum that the Delhi High Court subsequently questioned, asking whether any framework governs PG accommodations at all.
This is not an accident. This is a system designed to fail, and to profit from failure.
The Numbers That Kill
Delhi University has over 700,000 students across all programmes, regular, professional, and open-learning, with around 250,000 enrolled in conventional mode alone. More than half, some 350,000 students, come from outside Delhi. The university offers approximately 7,000 to 9,000 hostel beds across central and college hostels. Let that sink in. One in 31 students gets a hostel room. In 2025, over 30,000 undergraduate students applied for hostels, and less than 10 per cent secured a seat.
For comparison, Jawaharlal Nehru University houses 55 to 65 per cent of its students. Jamia Millia Islamia houses 15 per cent. Delhi University houses one per cent. By contrast, IIT-Delhi is reported to house about 50 per cent of its students, and AIIMS around 70 per cent, which shows that the problem is not a lack of resources but a lack of political will. DU does not even publish a consolidated figure of how many hostel beds are available to undergraduates, a transparency failure that makes it impossible for students to plan or hold the university accountable.
One per cent.
The rest, hundreds of thousands of young people, are handed over to an unregulated private market where landlords operate without oversight, without receipts, without shame. A twin-sharing PG in Satya Niketan costs ₹14,000 per month. Rents in areas around Delhi University range from ₹15,000 to ₹18,000. Accommodation with food can cost up to ₹17,000 a month. Owners often demand several months’ rent in advance, sometimes as much as three months’ rent, along with a security deposit. Rooms are cramped, divided by makeshift partitions. Buildings are never inspected. Fire safety clearances do not exist.
These students are not customers. They are prey.
A National Crisis, Not a Delhi Problem
This is not a Delhi problem. This is an Indian problem.
Nationally, demand for student accommodation is 12 to 13 million beds. Colleges and universities can house only about 4 million, barely 35 to 40 per cent of the need. The shortfall is close to 8 million beds. Uttar Pradesh alone is estimated to carry a deficit of nearly 6 million beds, and Maharashtra around 4.1 million.
These are not activist estimates. They come from property consultancies such as Colliers and Knight Frank, who describe the very same 8 million bed gap as a fifty-billion-dollar investment opportunity. Even the real-estate industry that hopes to profit from the shortage concedes that the state has handed 8 million students over to the private market.
In Maharashtra, the Comptroller and Auditor General uncovered six ghost hostels that received ₹1.62 crore in government funding while housing no students, and flagged poor infrastructure, non-functional facilities, and financial irregularities across the state’s student hostel system. In Hyderabad, student protests have erupted over pending hostel bills and unpaid scholarships. In Punjabi University, students protested for 19 days after a 42 per cent hike in hostel fees and won a rollback. In Delhi University, female students were allegedly forced out of their hostel over fee disputes.
The pattern is identical across the country: expanding enrolment, shrinking public provision, and a private market that treats students as cash cows.
The Court Speaks. The State Shrugs.
The Delhi High Court, hearing the Satya Niketan case, did not mince words. The tragedy could have been avoided, it observed, had the authorities been alive to their statutory duties. The court held that responsibility for unsafe buildings cannot be placed solely on their owners, and that the authorities must also be held accountable. The bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia issued notices to the Centre, the Delhi government, the MCD, Delhi Police and Delhi University, and it asked pointedly whether such PG buildings are safe for the students who live in them at all. It also directed Delhi University to disclose what proportion of its admitted students are actually given hostel facilities.
The court further noted a pattern. Buildings permitted for two floors are routinely extended by several additional floors while the original foundation remains unchanged, creating predictable, preventable death traps.
The court was right. But courts do not build hostels. Courts do not regulate rents. Courts do not ensure that a 50-year-old building with a weak foundation and a waterlogged basement is not crammed with students paying ₹15,000 a month for the privilege of dying under rubble.
The MCD began action against its officials. The Delhi government announced periodic structural audits, and Chief Minister Rekha Gupta said the government would not allow anyone to live in unsafe PGs. Three members of the owner’s family were arrested.
None of this will bring back the seven dead students. None of it will house the 350,000 outstation students who still have nowhere safe to sleep tonight.
No Alibi Left: One Party Governs Every Authority That Failed
There is a detail the ruling party would prefer the country to miss. Every single authority that failed these students is governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi, which first declared this building dangerous and then permitted a paying guest accommodation to run inside it, is controlled by the BJP under a BJP mayor. The Government of Delhi, which is responsible for the safety of every student who comes to the capital to study, is a BJP government led by Chief Minister Rekha Gupta. And the Union Government, which sets education policy and writes the national budget, is the BJP government of Narendra Modi. Even the Lieutenant Governor who convened the emergency meeting after the collapse is a central government appointee.
The BJP markets this arrangement as its triple-engine model and asks voters to reward it for the seamless power of one party holding the Centre, the state and the municipality at once. Satya Niketan is what that seamless power delivered. Three engines, one party, and seven dead students.
This matters because it removes every alibi. When the MCD vacated a dilapidated building and then licensed a hostel inside the very same structure, that was not a quarrel between rival parties passing files back and forth. It was one party’s own administration contradicting itself, and students died in the gap. There is no opposition government to blame at any level, no rival party holding up clearances, no coalition partner to point at. The negligence is entire, and it belongs to a single address.
The conduct after the tragedy tells the same story. When the case reached the Delhi High Court, the central government’s own Solicitor General urged that the matter not be sensationalised, even as the court was censuring the authorities for failing their statutory duties. The first instinct of the government’s most senior law officer was to manage the headline, not the hazard. The BJP government in Delhi offered structural audits only after seven young people were already dead, and the BJP-run MCD moved against a handful of its own junior officials while leaving untouched the system that licensed the death trap in the first place.
A government that controls every lever of a city cannot pretend that some other hand pulled them.
The Left Responds: Demands from the Site of the Tragedy
Today, CPI National Secretary P. Sandosh Kumar MP, Prof. Dinesh Varshney (CPI Delhi Secretary, Member of the National Executive, and former Dean of Students’ Welfare, University of Delhi), AISF General Secretary Dinesh Seerangaraj, and AISF President Viraaj Devang visited the Satya Niketan building collapse site and met those involved in the ongoing rescue and relief efforts. AISF and AIYF Delhi activists are on the spot around the clock, extending all possible assistance to the rescue operation and affected families.
The tragedy exposes the urgent need for accountability and structural reform. The CPI demands:
🔴 Hostel accommodation for all DU students. Every college and educational institution must be mandated to provide separate hostels for boys and girls.
🔴 A centralised student hostel facility in Delhi should be established by the Delhi Government to provide safe and affordable accommodation.
🔴 Adequate compensation to all those killed and injured, with immediate support to their families.
🔴 A comprehensive, time-bound safety audit of all PGs, hostels and student accommodations across Delhi, with unsafe structures immediately identified and action taken.
🔴 A statutory Student Housing and PG Safety law. The Delhi High Court has itself asked whether any framework governs PG accommodation at all. Parliament and the states must enact a law that licenses and inspects every student accommodation, caps rents and deposits, and mandates a funded Student Housing Mission with a clear bed target and a fixed timeline.
🔴 Fix accountability for negligence, regulatory failures and violations that put lives at risk.
🔴 The decisions on student accommodation, safety audits and accountability must be finalised at today’s 5 PM meeting at the LG House, involving the Chief Minister, DDA, MCD and all concerned authorities.
🔴 The Central and State Governments must ensure that at least 6 per cent of GDP is allocated to education, as a necessary investment in safe, accessible and quality public education.
The International Shame
Other countries solved this problem long ago.
In France, every university student, regardless of income, can buy a full meal for one euro at CROUS canteens. This rate, previously reserved for low-income students, was made universal from 4 May 2026, with the state absorbing the difference through an additional 50 million euros in the 2026 budget and a further 120 million euros pledged for 2027. Student residences there operate at rents far below market rates. In Germany, Studierendenwerke dormitories cost about 305 euros per month including all utilities, compared with roughly 500 euros or more on the private market. In the Nordic countries, student housing is treated as public infrastructure. In Chile, students forced education to the centre of national politics. In South Africa, the Fees Must Fall movement, in which poor students slept in libraries and lecture halls, won fee freezes and funding commitments.
In India, the failure begins at the top. It was the Modi government’s own National Education Policy 2020 that solemnly promised 6 per cent of GDP for education. Six years later, its own budgets have never come close. Public spending, according to UNESCO’s 2026 SDG 4 Scorecard, is stuck at only 4.1 per cent of GDP, and the same scorecard notes that education now receives just 14.2 per cent of total public expenditure, below the global benchmark of 15 per cent. The Union Budget 2026 allocated about ₹1.39 lakh crore to education, an increase of only 8.27 per cent over the previous year and still far below the target the government set for itself. It announced one girls’ hostel in every district, but the scheme is restricted to STEM students, is to be funded through viability gap funding, and carries no dedicated allocation for the coming financial year. Its revised outlay for 2025-26 was a mere ₹10 crore. A government that finds money for everything it treats as a priority has decided that housing the young is not one. That is not a solution. That is a token with no money behind it.
The Tradition of Resistance
This movement does not import its ideas from abroad. Its roots run deep in Indian soil.
Rajarshi Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, more than a century ago, founded hostels for students of every community, including separate hostels for the most oppressed castes, backed by scholarships and reservations. He understood that admission meant nothing to a poor boy who had nowhere to stay and no food in the city. Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule opened schools for girls and oppressed castes, and created spaces where such students could learn in safety and dignity. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar built an educational network where hostels and residential provision were central, because he knew from his own life how the lack of a place to stay could crush a brilliant student. Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil built the Rayat Shikshan Sanstha on the principle that a poor student could earn while learning, with a network of hostels for farmers’ and labourers’ sons.
Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda funded scholarships, including the Baroda State Scholarship that enabled B.R. Ambedkar to study at Columbia University in 1913, and introduced free and compulsory primary education across his kingdom in 1906. Vitthal Ramji Shinde worked through the Depressed Classes Mission (Bharatiya Nirashrit Sahayakari Mandali), which he founded in Bombay on 16 October 1906, opening day and night schools, hostels, and free dispensaries for the depressed classes.
What these reformers did by their own hand a century ago, today’s students have every right to demand as a matter of law and public budget from a democratic state.
To ask for subsidised hostels, cheap food and free transport is not charity. It is the completion of unfinished work.
No More Deaths for Want of a Bed
The AISF, founded on 12 August 1936 in the same year and the same city as the All India Kisan Sabha, carries this conviction into the present. Its demand is simple: subsidised and expanded public hostels, cheap mess and food, free public transport, regulation of the private rental market, hostels for women and deprived sections, a statutory legal framework, and a guaranteed budgetary framework.
The Charter of Demands is comprehensive. But the core is simple: a roof and a meal for every student.
The Satya Niketan collapse is what happens when students are treated as a captive rental market and their safety is sacrificed for profit. It follows a grim pattern. In Delhi alone this monsoon, six people were killed when a building collapsed in Saket on 3 June 2026, and now seven students in Satya Niketan. Before that came the drowning of UPSC aspirants in a flooded basement in Old Rajinder Nagar and the fires in coaching centres in Mukherjee Nagar. Each tragedy is met with outrage, inquiries and suspensions. Nothing changes.
Students cannot be left to pay exorbitant rents for unsafe PGs after working hard to secure admission. Safe accommodation and education are public responsibilities, not private privileges.
The movement is not asking for permission. It is already organising. The AISF has a nationwide student housing survey in the field, a full Charter of Demands, and a state-by-state database of the shortage covering Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and beyond. It is building the evidence, the alliances and the pressure to force a response.
Three governments could have prevented this, and one party runs all three. The courts have spoken.
The reformers showed the way. Now the students must move.
A roof and a meal for every student.
(Author: Rajan Kshirsagar, President, All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS))
Issued by the All India Students Federation (AISF).