When home in Delhi became a death trap: Satya Niketan building collapse

On the gloomy afternoon of September 6, Amit Choudhary, 20, stood waiting for a friend at the Nigori tea stall in Satya Niketan. A major student hub in south Delhi, Satya Niketan is located about 2 kilometres from Delhi University (DU)’s South Campus. The two of them had planned to drive to the university’s North Campus, about 20 km away.Suddenly, the ground beneath him shook. He heard a deafening sound and saw a huge cloud of dust. “I was blinded for 2-3 minutes,” he recalls.When the dust began to settle, Choudhary was shocked by what he saw. The five-storey building a few steps away, named Hostel Daze, had vanished. In its place was a heap of concrete slabs, bricks, and twisted metal. He could hear cries for help from beneath the rubble.For the first few minutes, nobody went near the site, says Choudhary. Live electricity wires had fallen, and the neighbouring building, packed with female students, was shaking. People stood panic-stricken at windows and on staircases, afraid that building might also come down. They watched, frozen, as screams continued to rise from beneath the debris next door.Seven people, including a labourer, died. Twelve people were rescued, while five others are battling for their lives in hospital.In Satya Niketan, many students stay in buildings that have been altered and expanded over the years to accommodate more tenants. As per the police investigation, Hostel Daze had been extended from its original structure, with changes made to the basement and ground floor. Locals and students say 35-40 students stayed there as paying guests (PG). Since September 6 was the Sunday of a long weekend, there were fewer students in the building at the time of the tragedy.The incident has raised questions about the safety of buildings across the neighbourhood: in 2022, a three-storey building in Satya Niketan collapsed during renovation work to convert it into a PG accommodation, killing two labourers and injuring four others.It has also exposed failures by both the building owner and the authorities responsible for enforcing construction and safety regulations. Officials from the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) say the building had no sanctioned plan and that the owner had not obtained the required fire no-objection certificate or occupancy certificate. The civic body, meanwhile, has no record of inspections or enforcement action against the unauthorised construction. Rescue operations underway after a building collapsed near Satya Niketan in South-West Delhi, in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap Hands before machinesChoudhary says the first people to attempt rescues at the scene were not uniformed personnel; they were students, shopkeepers, and residents.When he and a few other students realised that some people were trapped beneath a big slab of concrete, they began breaking through it by hand. The reinforcing steel bars inside the slab would not give way easily. “It took us about an hour to break the slab,” he says. Between broken pieces of concrete still held together by steel, they began pulling people out.Choudhary says that by the time Delhi Fire Service personnel reached the scene through the narrow lanes, three people had been rescued.According to the Delhi Fire Service, the first distress call reached them at 1.33 p.m., about 15 minutes after Choudhary recalls the building collapsing. The first vehicle turned out from the service a minute later, according to Chief Fire Officer A.K. Malik.Assistant Divisional Officer Santosh Kumar was among those who responded. It was his day off, and he was leaving home in Safdarjung to visit a temple when his phone rang. He says he immediately climbed into the response vehicle outside his house and changed into his uniform on the way. “When a call comes, everything else becomes insignificant,” he says.But the last stretch had to be covered on foot. Satya Niketan’s lanes are so narrow that two people can barely walk side by side. Fire personnel carried hammers, shovels, electric cutters, and other equipment towards the site. By 1.50 p.m., after a preliminary assessment of the scale of the collapse, Kumar says they sought more people on ground and a senior officer.Kumar remembers one victim being trapped beneath a large concrete slab, with only his legs visible. His face and abdomen were pinned beneath the slab. “It took us over 30 minutes to get him out. We could hear his heartbeat. We just wanted to pull him out alive,” he says.As he was being placed on a stretcher, another survivor informed Kumar that more people remained trapped. “I could see them. Some of them were crying to be saved. I held their hand and told them, ‘Don’t worry, you will be okay.’ I hope they were able to recover from their injuries,” Kumar says.The rescue operation involving the Delhi Fire Service, the National Disaster Response Force, and the Delhi Police continued into the following day. The final survivor was pulled out at noon on September 7. A survivor being taken into an ambulance. | Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap Identifying the deadAt the AIIMS Trauma Centre, located about 7 km from the scene, Pushpa Jhajj sat in the waiting area, crying for her 19-year-old son Arpit. He had celebrated the festivals of Raksha Bandhan and Janmashtami with his family in Dewas in Madhya Pradesh and had returned to Delhi just hours before the building collapsed. He called his mother after reaching his PG at 8 a.m. At around 11.30 a.m., he called her again on video. “Who would have known that was the last time we would speak,” says Jhajj, crying.On hearing the news, she and her husband Bhupendra caught the first flight to Delhi with two other family members. They reached AIIMS around midnight.For hours, they were unable to find out what had happened to Arpit. The next afternoon, Jhajj was finally taken to see an unidentified body. The face was severely distorted. Then she noticed the mole on his chest.Near the mortuary, Biren Singh Yadav waited for the body of his nephew, Akshat Singh Yadav. The 19-year-old’s face was also too disfigured to be immediately recognisable. The family eventually identified him by the mark left by an operation he had undergone as a child.Akshat, too, had gone home and returned to Delhi just two days earlier. His mother had asked him to stay back for a little longer. “But he said he had to leave for classes,” Biren says. A PG accommodation in Delhi. | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumer Verma Running awayBy the evening of the tragedy, students in neighbouring PGs had begun packing their suitcases.Anushriti, 20, from Kanpur, had been staying in Satya Niketan for nearly a year. She was sleeping on the fourth floor of a nearby PG when her bed shook. She left her accommodation in her night clothes with only her phone in hand and went to a friend’s home in Moti Bagh.By about 10 p.m., the area beneath the Durgabai Deshmukh South Campus Metro station had become a waiting area for students who had nowhere to sleep. Many sat on the footpath. AISA Students stage a protest against the government as a building collapsed, killing 7 people, at Satya Niketan in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap Unnayan, 19, a student who lives in a cramped accommodation in Satya Niketan and had been house-hunting in the same locality that morning, saw the building collapse just 20 metres away. The image kept returning whenever he tried to sleep. He eventually left his PG at about 1 a.m. and went to a friend’s home in Ber Sarai. But he could not sleep there either.Another student from Guwahati, who has no relatives in Delhi, spent the night at her college. She says the classrooms were turned into temporary shelters, with mattresses spread across the floor.Living on borrowed floorsSatya Niketan did not become a student neighbourhood overnight. Its proximity to South Campus, the metro station, Ring Road, and colleges such as Motilal Nehru College, Sri Venkateswara College, Aryabhatta College, and Ram Lal Anand College has made it one of the most sought-after residential areas for students from outside Delhi.However, the demand for rooms has outpaced institutional accommodation. DU has more than 2.5 lakh students in conventional programmes, while its hostel capacity is estimated at only around 9,000 beds. More than half its students come from outside the capital, according to the university’s 2024-25 annual report. That gap has produced a parallel housing economy.MCD officials and Malik say the five-storey building was originally constructed as a G+1 (ground floor plus one upper floor) structure in the 1970s and 1980s when Satya Niketan was being developed as a resettlement colony by the Delhi Development Authority to provide modest, low-rise housing for displaced families and low-income groups from across Delhi. The original structure had no columns or beams and relied on load-bearing brick walls. Malik says three additional floors were added in 1990.As per the MCD, freehold rights were granted in 2011, allowing owners to extend buildings up to the permissible floor-area ratio, subject to an approved building plan and the condition of the existing structure. But this building never had a sanctioned plan.Similarly, across Satya Niketan and other areas such as Mukherjee Nagar, Old Rajinder Nagar, and Karol Bagh, old residential houses have gradually been converted into PGs. Floors have been divided into rooms, rooms into beds, and balconies, terraces, and other spaces absorbed into the rental market.A bed in a shared room can cost ₹12,000-₹24,000 a month, while annual academic fees at DU range from ₹15,000 to ₹80,000, depending on the course and college. In these buildings, two beds are placed just inches apart, leaving barely any space to stand. Food and water may be included, while electricity is charged separately. “Students often accept these conditions because the alternative is to pay more for a flat farther from college or spend hours travelling every day,” says a student, Yash Malhotra.The result is a neighbourhood of narrow lanes lined with multi-storey buildings, balconies jutting over roads, and electricity and cable wires strung between structures.Several students who left Satya Niketan after the collapse say cracks and seepage are common in rented accommodation, but leaving is not easy. Rent agreements, deposits, and the shortage of available rooms can make it difficult for them to leave even when they are unsafe.The economics are stark. Landlords have a steady stream of prospective tenants, while a student arriving in Delhi may have only days to find a room before classes begin. In such a market, a room does not remain vacant for long.Police say the PG operator of Hostel Daze, Sudhanshu Lovneesh, and his business partner, Shubham Tyagi, had taken four floors on lease in August 2025 for ₹1.05 lakh a month. They were operating seven PGs in the vicinity. The police say the operators had taken the building on a lower rent than the market rate because of its “dilapidated condition”. This detail has become central to the investigation.Two days before the collapse, Dhruv Singh Bhatia, a third-year student of Motilal Nehru College, had visited the PG to check on first-year students from his college. About 15 students from the college stayed there and had complained about loud work in the basement, where water had also accumulated.Bhatia says he noticed cracks in the building, damp walls, and three or four beds packed into some of the small rooms. The entrance was narrow and the building poorly maintained.“It is scary that I was here just two days ago. We told the students, ‘Let’s wait and see for one or two days. And this happened,” he says. A street filled with wires at Satya Niketan in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap The aftermathAccording to the police investigation, Mahesh Gupta, the son of the property owners, had engaged a labour contractor, Sanoj Kumar, about 10 days before the incident, for work in the basement and on the ground floor.Investigators found three truckloads of debris in the basement, which had been used to raise its level to that of the ground floor. On the day of the collapse, a wall on the ground floor that obstructed space intended for a shop was allegedly removed. Police suspect the alterations and the resulting changes in the load on the structure contributed to its collapse. Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) personnel dismantle an unsafe adjacent structure following the multi-storey building collapse tragedy at Satya Niketan in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap “They were digging a basement within a building when it was already occupied. The additional floors and the basement are anyway illegal, but the building should have at least been vacated if they wanted to carry out work,” Malik says.Sanoj was arrested in Kasganj in Uttar Pradesh on September 9 and brought back to Delhi. Police say he was being paid ₹2,800 a day for the work. An FIR under Sections 105 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 290 (negligent conduct with respect to pulling down, repairing, or constructing buildings) and 125 (a) (endangering life or personal safety of others) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, has been registered.The property was registered in the name of Urmila Gupta. The police say her husband Hariram Gupta and son Mahesh were involved in its management. All three were arrested from Bhiwadi in Rajasthan, where they were hiding.After the incident, the MCD suspended five South Zone officials, including the Deputy Commissioner, and began inspecting and sealing buildings in the neighbourhood. It demolished the wobbly building next door and evacuated the PGs and hostels nearby.The Delhi High Court has taken up the issue of student accommodation, including the shortage of institutional hostels and the safety of private PGs. A petition has sought city-wide safety audits and accountability for regulatory failures. The Court has also been asked to examine the shortage of hostel accommodation for DU students.The Delhi government has said it plans to strengthen regulation of PG accommodation, including licensing and safety requirements.Many students have left Satya Niketan, saying they will not return until the MCD conducts safety checks and assures them that the buildings are safe. “This area is the most common choice for those of us who join DU because of its proximity to campus. But after what I saw, I don’t want to stay here any more,” says Unnayan.A relative of a student from Guwahati says she had moved to the PG only a month ago. “How can we let our child live here knowing that she is not safe,” she asks. “Even if it means she has to travel longer to get to her classes, we would rather have her somewhere safe.”