The Satya Niketan tragedy has brought much-needed attention to accommodation for delhi university (DU) students . The figures underline the scale of the problem: Around 70,000 students are enrolled in DU’s undergraduate programmes Every year, and its PG courses have more than 10,000 seats. While the university’s hostels have 3,422 seats, the colleges affiliated to it have 3,788 seats. Many of these students come from outside the city, and it’s clear that DU’s hostel network cannot accommodate them. The result is a vast dependence on private paying-guest facilities and rented accommodation, often in densely packed neighbourhoods with unsafe conditions close to university campuses. For outstation students, the soaring accommodation costs offset DU’s affordable tuition fees. Seven months after assuming office, the university’s vice chancellor announced plans to build two 1,000-bed hostels near North Campus. But as an investigation in this paper shows, as the VC begins a second term next month. the projects remain held up by funding constraints, space crunch, land-use restrictions and administrative hurdles . The immediate priority must be to expand safe and affordable hostel accommodation, while also recognising that the gap is too large to be bridged by construction projects initiated by the university alone. In the past, the Delhi government, DU and its colleges have rarely come together to devise solutions that treat student housing as part of the university’s essential infrastructure. Delhi’s master plans have allowed property owners to adapt their houses to provide student accommodation, provided they adhere to safety norms. In practice, these caveats were flouted. At the same time, DU hasn’t shown much initiative to engage with the private accommodation market around its campuses. Options such as a university-maintained database of accommodation, with information on rents, occupancy, and compliance with basic safety standards, were never explored. After the Satya Niketan tragedy, Delhi’s Chief Minister has called for a survey to identify colleges with sufficient space for hostel construction. These units will be built via public-private partnership, and the Delhi CM has promised that the government will ensure students’ safety. These are steps in the right direction, but the government needs to do more. For starters, it needs to nudge the colleges to look at out-of-the-box solutions — drawing in entrepreneurs by pooling the colleges’ unused parcels of land into hostel sites could be an option. A student life in Delhi helps many youngsters spread their wings. As the brother of one of the victims of the Satya Niketan incident told this paper, “he loved the city”. The best tribute to those who lost their lives last week would be to end the lack of imagination and political will that denies people like them a safe home in the city.
