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.
Delhi University’s hostel shortage pushes thousands of students to seek accommodation in private PGs across the city. Photograph: (Scroll.in)
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 Seismic Zone 4, a high-risk earthquake zone. The Hostel Daze building had been built upward over decades, floor by floor, without reinforced concrete columns or beams. It relied only on load-bearing walls, which can hold just so much weight.
“Unless you thicken the wall, where else would the load of the floors above keep going?” Kukreja asks. “It was a fundamentally flawed construction, and something which is visible to the naked eye, and has been completely and blatantly ignored.”
Shared hostel rooms can offer little privacy or access to the outdoors, making basic design choices important to student wellbeing. Photograph: (Indian Youth)
He compares a building to a living body. “Any building is akin to a human body. It requires regular upkeep and checks and balances.”
But in this case, he says, no amount of maintenance could have fixed the core problem. “Even if you come and inspect every year, it is not good enough. It should not have been built, period.”
Awareness isn’t the issue
For Parmar, the failure runs deeper than one building, and closer to home.
“We have failed ourselves as a society and a country, at all levels,” he says. Rules already exist for staircase numbers, corridor widths, and the ratio of windows to floor area. Someone, at some point, chose to ignore all of them, and everyone in the chain knew it.
“These incidents happen all the time, and they are treated as accidents,” he says. “It is time we begin to target the core, which is mindset. There isn’t a will to improve living conditions for students.”
Safer student housing, experts argue, is possible with stronger certification, continuous inspections and a greater focus on long-term liveability.
He adds that the legal grey zone around PGs makes things worse. “There is a legal issue too, because these are residential accommodations converted into PGs, and the living conditions are pathetic. It is a holistic issue.”
He is also sceptical of Delhi’s newly proposed fix, which allows PGs to expand and rebuild on more land. “Is space the issue? No. The inflow of students will be endless,” he says. “If you deal with it only at a planning or land use level, it will solve a temporary problem, not the real one.”
Both experts agree the real fix has to be structural, in the literal sense and the systemic one. Here is the blueprint they laid out.
The blueprint for safer housing
1. Rate PGs the way we rate restaurants.
Parmar’s first recommendation is a visible, recurring livability score, not a one-time approval. “Food establishments get inspected periodically. Why not housing?” he asks.
He envisions a system where PGs are assessed on a regular cycle, on things like ventilation, floor area, fire exits and structural upkeep, with the results published where students and parents can actually see them before signing a lease.
Professor Sangramsinh Parmar of Anant National University advocates safer, healthier student housing through better design.
A PG with a poor score would struggle to fill rooms, giving owners a direct, ongoing reason to maintain the building, not just pass an inspection once.
2. Monitor with better technology
Parmar suggests that technology is employed in all aspects of public life. So why not in monitoring and flagging structural violations and dangers? For this, he points to technology already in use elsewhere in Asia.
“Taiwan and Korea have sensors that sense wind, rain and structural strain, and trigger an alert to the authorities the moment a threshold is crossed,” he says. “We have the tech personnel in India to do this. The brainpower is there.”
He draws a parallel to traffic enforcement: cities that installed CCTV cameras at traffic lights saw violations drop simply because people knew they were being watched.
He believes the same principle could apply to construction.
3. Make structural certification mandatory, and enforced.
“Structural engineers are very important, and their certification is vital,” Parmar says.
Every city technically requires construction drawings to be stamped by a certified structural engineer, but the rule is routinely ignored.
He wants that certification made mandatory and enforced the way medical licensing is, through a central, checkable registry.
4. Design for daylight, air, and space, not just walls.
Kukreja’s basics are simple, and already written into the National Building Code: daylight access, proper ventilation, and a minimum floor area per student.
But even Bengaluru’s current civic minimum of 70 square feet per student, hi says, is far too low.
Architect Dikshu C Kukreja says buildings in Delhi’s seismic Zone 4 must account for structural safety from the outset.
He recommends closer to 200 square feet per student, broken down roughly as 100 square feet for the room itself, 35 to 40 for corridors, toilets and staircases, and about 60 for shared amenities like a dining area, a reading room or a common lounge.
5. Treat liveability as a long-term saving, not an upfront cost.
Parmar pushes back on the idea that safer buildings are unaffordable. “The initial investment is not significantly different. Spending a little more on quality materials or fittings pays off over decades in comfort and lower maintenance,” he says.
“Somehow in India, people only look at the capital expense, not the operating one. We save money now and deal with it later. But we need to value lives more than that.”
He points to Singapore’s dedicated department of design, which reports directly to the Prime Minister and shapes everything from airports to immigration counters.
“Everything is designed beautifully there, because there is a body responsible for it. Culture matters, but it has to be accommodating of new ideas, not resistant to them,” he says.
6. Bring design education into schools and universities.
Parmar’s own university in Gujarat is pushing to add design to the school curriculum, alongside the standard science stream. “You have Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics (PCBM). Why can’t you have a D, for design?” he asks.
JNU’s original hostel design placed private balconies and shared spaces at the heart of student life, offering a model for community-oriented housing. Photograph: (JNU)
He also believes architects have a role to play beyond paid work, suggesting the profession could set aside pro bono time each year for underserved housing, the way many lawyers and doctors already do.
7. Make on-campus housing the default, not the exception
Kukreja’s central argument is that universities should be legally required to provide on-campus accommodation wherever possible. “Education is not just about classrooms. It is the complete experiential learning a student has within a cohort,” he says.
Students arriving from smaller towns are often “left to fend for themselves” in an unfamiliar city, a risk he says is especially acute for women.
Where on-campus housing genuinely is not possible, he believes universities should take formal, documented responsibility for the PGs their students live in. “Otherwise, don’t admit students. Don’t expand your capacity.”
8. Design for community, not just shelter
Kukreja points to JNU’s original hostel design as a model: rooms of 10×10 feet, each with a small private balcony. “A student cannot just be sitting in a cloistered room,” he says. “The moment you step onto a balcony, you are relating to nature, and naturally you learn to respect it.”
Experts say student accommodation needs more than adequate walls and beds, with daylight, ventilation and sufficient floor space built into its design. Photograph: (Hindustan Times)
Each hostel block housed 200 students around shared interactive spaces, with three blocks clustered together to share larger common amenities.
He says JNU alumni, including foreign ministers and finance ministers, still recall their hostel life as the most formative part of their education, something a purely commercial PG was never designed to offer.
A change within reach
Delhi’s shortage of hostel beds took decades to build up, and it will not be solved overnight. But none of the fixes above are hypothetical. Sensors that flag structural strain already exist. A 200 square foot standard already has a working precedent in JNU.
A licensing policy is already on the table. What has been missing is not the knowledge of what safe student housing looks like, but the will to enforce it, and the willingness to see it as worth the cost.
That shift does not have to wait for the next tragedy to force it. It can start with the next building.
