Ask Professor Sangramsinh Parmar, Associate Professor and Lead of Space Design at Anant National University, to describe a typical PG room in Delhi, and he does not start with the collapse. He starts with a window.

Not the kind that opens to the sky. The kind that opens into a corridor, in a room shared by four or five students who have no other view of the outside world.

"It is not just physical health but also mental health that's affected adversely," he says. "They are already under a lot of stress, and then imagine living in a room with four other people without a window that opens out to nothing."

It is a small, easy-to-miss detail. But it says something larger about how India's PG housing has been built, room by room, corner by corner, with barely a thought for the person who has to live in it.

That detail became impossible to ignore on 6 September, 2026, when a five-storey PG called Hostel Daze collapsed in Satya Niketan, a neighbourhood behind Delhi University's South Campus, killing seven students while they slept.

The building was around 50 years old and had been converted into a PG only weeks earlier, in August. Residents say renovation work, including in the basement, was still underway even as tenants lived there.

Its owner had long since moved out of the city and was not overseeing the property locally.

Within days, Delhi University's Vice-Chancellor ordered a review of hostel capacity, and the Delhi government proposed a new PG licensing policy, its first real attempt to regulate this kind of housing at all.

The collapse exposed a fact Delhi has quietly lived with for years: it does not have enough beds for the students it has. Delhi University has more than seven lakh students enrolled, but fewer than 8,000 hostel rooms.

In 2025, over 30,000 undergraduate students applied for a hostel seat. Fewer than one in ten got one, according to a report by Hindustan Times.

The rest went looking for private accommodation in neighbourhoods like Satya Niketan, in buildings that were never designed to hold this many people.

We asked two experts, an architect and an urban planner, what a safer system could actually look like. Their answer was not simply "build more."

It was a set of specific, workable fixes, some structural, some behavioural, that together sketch out a blueprint any Indian city could use.

Visible to the naked eye

Architect and urban planner Dikshu C Kukreja, whose firm designed the original JNU campus, points to the specific engineering failure behind the collapse.

Delhi sits in........

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