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.
In July 2024, three students drowned when the basement of Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar flooded during heavy rain, an area that, like Satya Niketan, had absorbed thousands of students into buildings never designed to hold them. Two students died after falling from a fourth-floor window of a PG in Delhi’s Rohini the same year. Each incident produced a brief cycle of outrage, a First Information Report (FIR), a promise of scrutiny, and little structural change.
Across India, a widening gap between how many students need a place to live near their colleges and how many official hostel seats exist has pushed a generation of young people into a shadow rental economy of paying guest accommodations, room-shares and subdivided flats, many of them unregulated, unsafe and unaffordable at once.
The numbers behind the shortage
Government data offer some sense of scale. In the most recent All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), roughly 15% of universities had no hostel facilities at all. That figure counts only whether a hostel exists, not whether it can seat every student who wants in.
Even where hostels do exist, getting a seat in one is its own filter. At Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), one of the country’s most sought-after public universities, hostel eligibility is means-tested rather than need-based, a policy that has pushed students like Lashnalli into the private market anyway.
“I would prefer the institute’s hostel, but the thing is that I won’t get it because there is an income limit,” said Lashnalli, a student from Kozhikode, Kerala, now in her second year at TISS’s Mumbai campus. Students whose family income exceeds a year are ineligible, regardless of need.
After her first year, she moved into a shared flat with two roommates, paying ₹6,500 a month toward a total rent of nearly ₹20,000. Some of her peers pay double that. “If you look at Kerala, the city where I’m from, you can get an entire two-BHK for much less, especially if you’re sharing,” she said. “It is also a burden on our families.”
Centralised exams and distant colleges
The arithmetic Lashnalli describes, a hometown rent a fraction of what a metropolitan campus demands is compounded by a structural feature of Indian higher education that has little to do with any single city’s cost of living: the country’s reliance on centralised, national entrance examinations that route students, often for the first time in their lives, into cities and States far from home.
Saubia, 25, grew up in Jharkhand and now studies at Yenepoya Medical College in Mangalore, Karnataka, a placement determined by her rank in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), the single exam that decides admission to nearly every medical seat in the country.
More than 2 million students competed for roughly 90,000 undergraduate medical seats in the most recent cycle, and because States cap the share of seats reserved for their own residents, most successful candidates end up training somewhere other than home.
For Saubia, that meant three years in a college hostel before the arrangement made her sick. “The quality of food was particularly concerning, as I frequently experienced health issues while staying in the hostel,” she said, describing recurring outbreaks of diarrhoea among students before she was herself diagnosed with both typhoid and dengue. “That became a significant turning point for me.” Her parents decided she would be safer outside the institution’s own walls, an inversion of the usual argument for campus housing that says something about how far that safety net has frayed.
Mold, money and no recourse
If Saubia’s ordeal illustrates what happens inside the hostels students do get into, Mansa’s illustrates the market waiting for those who don’t. A visual communications student at St. Joseph’s University in Bengaluru, Mansa found no hostel option for women on or near her campus when she enrolled and instead booked a single room in a PG for ₹25,000 a month, on par with an entry-level monthly salary.
“A little later down the line, I started seeing a lot of black marks on the walls and a bit of red marks on the walls,” she said. “It was more like black and red mold growing on it, and I think that kind of explained why I was getting so sick.”
She later learned the landlord had painted over the mold before she moved in. She left without recovering her deposit, deciding her health mattered more than pursuing the money. “No one wants to live in a substandard area,” she said. “No one wants to live in a place where it’s going to affect their health, but essentially everyone just wants their money.”
Mansa said that institutions and landlords alike treat student housing as a revenue line rather than a duty of care. Unlike registered hostels, most PG accommodations in university neighbourhoods operate outside municipal safety codes meant for residential and commercial buildings, without codes calibrated for student housing. The building that collapsed in Satya Niketan was 40 to 50 years old and had been converted, like much of the neighbourhood around it, from a family home into a warren of rented rooms.
Universities, for their part, have occasionally responded to public pressure rather than acted ahead of it. Mansa’s own college opened two new women’s hostels at the start of this year, a change she welcomed but noted came only after years of students living wherever they could afford.
Lashnalli said, students from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Classes backgrounds, who are often navigating an unfamiliar city for the first time, absorb the greatest risk with the least room to negotiate rent, deposits or repairs.
The bias Lashnalli describes has been measured, not just observed. A landlord-callback study across Delhi and its suburbs found upper-caste applicants received a response 35 percent of the time, against 22 percent for Muslim applicants, with the gap widening further for anyone seeking a single room, the exact kind of housing a student living alone would look for.
A separate audit of the rental market across five cities in the National Capital Region found landlord prejudice locks out both Dalit and Muslim tenants, with Muslim applicants facing the steeper barrier, and found that those who do secure a room often do so only by accepting worse terms than upper-caste tenants on the same street.
Lashnalli argued that any institution “of national importance hould give at least a proper accommodation,” and said the University Grants Commission has no binding framework requiring universities to guarantee housing or even a vetted list of safe, affordable options near campus. “Education often becomes secondary and survival the primary goal as you pursue your studies,” she said.
(Danish Pandit is a journalist and a documentary filmmaker based in Delhi. Hanan Zaffar is a journalist covering tech environment and AI. He is based in New Delhi.)