A five-storey building operating as a paying guest hostel for students, "Hostel Days" collapsed near Satya Niketan in Delhi's Moti Bagh on September 6, 2026. The building housed a boys' paying guest accommodation close to Delhi University's South Campus and stood on a plot of about 55 square yards. Municipal officials have since stated that no sanctioned building plan existed for the structure, and that construction carried out in the basement was unauthorised. The death toll has risen to six, with eleven people rescued from the debris. Following the collapse, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi announced it would seal illegal structures above four floors across the city. The fact that they only seal buildings after something goes wrong is a tacit admission that they have no system in place to catch unsafe paying-guest accommodations ahead of time.
A building collapse in Karol Bagh's Regarpura killed a labourer weeks earlier, during demolition work for which no permission had been obtained. Satya Niketan has its own history of structural failures tied to unregulated renovation in a locality where old, low-rise houses have been converted, floor by floor, into dense student hostels. What links these incidents together is the total lack of a legal framework that treats paying-guest accommodations for what they really are, commercial operations housing dozens of people, often in buildings that were never designed or approved for that purpose.
A business with no statute in place
Delhi's paying guest sector is large, and it is informal almost by design. PGs cluster around university campuses and employment hubs, and the demand for cheap, short-notice housing has meant that residential structures, some decades old, get converted into commercial dormitories with minimal scrutiny. Unlike hotels or guest houses, PGs in the city have never had a dedicated statute governing them. What exists instead is a patchwork of rules scattered across different departments—a police verification requirement for tenants, a house tax reassessment for commercial use of residential premises, and a trade licence that, in practice, that is rarely enforced. Even as late as 2022, Delhi Police was still debating whether to licence PGs and hostels at all, because, in the words of one civic officer, no written rule made it mandatory. That's a loophole, not the carelessness of any one owner, is what permitted a thirty-year-old structure, complete with illegal basement work and no approved plan, to function as a hostel until the day it gave way.
Courts have not been silent on unauthorised construction, the Supreme Court, while ordering the demolition of illegal structures raised on public land in Okhla village, was unambiguous that unauthorised construction cannot be allowed to stand merely because it has existed for years or because demolition would cause hardship to occupants. The principle is effective against encroachments on public land, but it remains flat when applied to a PG hostel on privately owned residential property that is even one built without approval. That's because no authority is mandated to proactively check for violations; they only act after something goes wrong.
Building a registration and accountability framework
A workable response has to begin with mandatory registration. No PG should be permitted to commence or continue operating without registration with the Municipal Corporation, particularly where the operator holds ownership rights over the building being used. Registration is what lets a civic body even know a commercial hostel exists in the first place. Without it, enforcement is limited to buildings that happen to attract a complaint or to the worse, a tragedy.
Registration alone does not verify who is living inside a building at any given time. PG owners should be statutorily required to update periodic returns to the Corporation and to the Income Tax Department detailing occupants, including PAN details wherever applicable. Since PG operations generate continuous rental income, that income should be taxed like any other commercial letting, and establishments above the relevant turnover threshold should be brought within the Goods and Services Tax net. Owners should also be required to maintain records of how shared amenities, particularly internet connections, are used including device-level identifiers, which have repeatedly come in handy when shared connections are exploited for illegal purposes.
Accountability also has to be visible on the ground; Every PG should display a signboard with the owner's name, the registered name of the establishment, its GST number, a registered contact number, the address, and separately, the name and number of the person responsible for maintenance. Such a requirement only works if owners are bound to regularly update it, and if there are meaningful penalties, proportionate to the violation, for failing to do so.
The Corporation should be also required to issue an annual maintenance certificate in the owner's name, based on an actual inspection, with an automatic cancellation of the PG's registration if the certificate lapses. For this to be more than just another rubber stamp, owners should be required to apply for renewal roughly six months in advance, so the Corporation has time to conduct actual inspections instead of simply clearing files.
Liability should track responsibility, rather than defaulting entirely to the owner. As a starting point, the PG owner is liable for incidents arising from the building's condition or operation. But where the Corporation has certified a building as structurally fit and it later fails, the certifying authority cannot be shielded from consequence. Liability should extend to it in proportion to any negligence in inspection or certification. Absent that, certification becomes a formality rather than a safeguard, since the body issuing it bears no cost when it gets the assessment wrong.
Finally, compensation should not be reliant on discretionary announcements made after a tragedy occurs. PG buildings should be required to carry mandatory insurance, so that victims of a collapse, fire, or similar incident have a clear route to compensation, rather than one contingent on political attention to a particular disaster.
What the framework would have changed
Each points above answers a specific failure already visible in Delhi's record: unregistered PGs operating unchecked across student and working-professional clusters; old buildings altered without sanctioned plans; no structural certification regime for commercial hostels; and no consequence for a civic body that either certified a dangerous building or never inspected it at all. Mandatory registration would have flagged the Moti Bagh building as a hostel operating without a sanctioned plan. A certification requirement, with inspection rather than paper renewal, would have tested the very basement alterations now being blamed for the collapse. Shared liability would have given the Corporation a direct stake in getting that inspection right, rather than sealing buildings only after people have died in them.
Delhi already has the administrative apparatus to do this: the Corporation, the police, the fire department and the tax authorities each already touch a piece of the paying guest business. What is missing is a single, binding statute that makes registration, certification and insurance conditions precedent to operating a PG at all, instead of scattered obligations that apply unevenly and only when someone happens to look. The people trapped under the rubble in Moti Bagh didn't choose an unregistered, uncertified building over a regulated one. They had no way of knowing the difference, because the law doesn't currently require one to exist.
Author is a second year Law student at University School of Law and Legal Studies (USLLS). Views are personal.