Unregulated paying-guest housing around university campuses is a governance blind spot. Examine the regulatory and institutional measures needed to ensure student safety.

In September 2026 a five-storey paying-guest (PG) building collapsed in Delhi's Satya Niketan, killing several students. It showed that housing next to campuses is regulated by no one in particular. Universities see it as private housing, municipalities treat it as ordinary homes, and tenancy law rarely covers it.

Why it is a governance blind spot

• Regulatory gap: PGs run as informal rentals, often without written agreements. No authority knows who lives where.
• Safety gap: Illegal extra floors and old buildings escape inspection. The National Building Code requires certified structural safety and peer review of building designs, but local bodies enforce it weakly [1].
• Institutional gap: Universities admitted more students without building more hostels. This pushes students from outside the city, women and North-East students into the private market.
• Market failure: Rooms are scarce, so landlords do not need to compete on safety.

Regulatory measures

• License PGs above a set number of beds. The licence should depend on structural and fire-safety certification under NBC 2016 and be renewed periodically [1].
• Register tenancies: States should adopt the Model Tenancy Act, 2021. It requires written agreements to be reported to a Rent Authority and provides quick dispute resolution [2].
• Audit buildings regularly in student areas, and hold named officials accountable when they allow unauthorised construction.

Institutional measures

• Build more hostels: Make hostel capacity a condition for approving new colleges. Use HEFA (Higher Education Financing Agency) loans, where Central Universities set up before 2014 repay only 10% of the principal [3]. Apply for hostels for Scheduled Caste (SC) students under the PM-AJAY hostel component [4].
• Approved housing lists: Universities should list only inspected PGs and run grievance cells for students living off campus.
• Joint action: Set up a joint university, municipality and police task force for neighbourhoods around campuses.

Keeping students safe needs both more university-run rooms and a regulated private market, because neither works alone. Combining new hostels with PG licensing, tenancy registration and building audits would make student housing a shared responsibility. This would uphold the right to life under Article 21 and the inclusive-education goal of SDG 4.