On Sunday (September 6), a five-storey paying-guest building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan collapsed. The building, known as Hostel Daze, was being used predominantly by students attending colleges around Delhi University’s South Campus. By the time rescue operations ended more than 27 hours later, seven people had died and 12 had been rescued; five of those rescued were receiving treatment. Among the dead were five students and two workers. The building was around 50–55 years old. Preliminary findings point to a disturbing combination of an ageing structure, unauthorised alterations, additional floors, ongoing repair work and water accumulation in the basement. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi has suspended five officials, including the South Zone deputy commissioner and four engineers. The owner and two members of his family have been arrested, while a magisterial inquiry has been ordered. These facts matter. But the larger question is harder: why did students have to live there in the first place?The timing could hardly be more revealing. Delhi is preparing to host the 18th BRICS Leaders’ Summit from September 11 to 13 at Bharat Mandapam. Roads are being prepared, sanitation and beautification drives intensified, traffic routes reorganised and security arrangements expanded for visiting leaders and delegations. There is nothing wrong with hosting an international summit. The problem is what the contrast tells us about the priorities of the city and the state.Delhi can mobilise extraordinary administrative capacity when international visitors are involved. Yet in Satya Niketan, a building accommodating young people studying at one of India’s most important public universities was allowed to become a potential death trap.This is not simply a story about one negligent property owner. It is about the consequences of a housing system in which the public university admits students without providing anything close to adequate accommodation for them.Delhi University’s own numbers reveal the scale of the problem. Its 2024–25 annual report recorded more than 2.5 lakh conventional-mode students, including about 2.1 lakh undergraduates and 34,520 postgraduates and PhD students. Yet the university has only around 9,000 hostel beds by current estimates, many of which are reserved for particular categories or programmes. More than half of DU students come from outside Delhi. Also read: Regulatory Failure and Absence of Engineering Oversight are Turning Urban Buildings into Death TrapsThat means thousands of students have little choice but to enter Delhi’s private rental and PG market.Satya Niketan is precisely the kind of neighbourhood this shortage produces: a dense student housing economy built around South Campus colleges. Private PGs have proliferated because the university has not built enough institutional accommodation. The result is a parallel housing system in which students pay market rates for rooms in buildings whose structural history, fire-safety status and construction permissions they have little ability to investigate.A student arriving from Kerala, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh or another part of India does not negotiate with the urban housing market from a position of strength. Admission to a university creates an immediate need for shelter. If a hostel place is unavailable, the student rents whatever is available.The state cannot then wash its hands of what happens inside that market.The Satya Niketan collapse is particularly disturbing because the warning signs were not invisible. Authorities are examining unauthorised construction, basement work and the absence of proper approvals. The collapsed property reportedly stood on a small plot and had a basement and four floors above ground; officials have also questioned whether its construction matched sanctioned plans. The tragedy is part of a wider pattern.In July 2024, three civil-services aspirants died after the basement of a coaching centre in Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar flooded. In June 2026, a fire at a coaching facility in Lucknow killed 15 people, most of them students. A preliminary probe there found serious safety concerns, including a single staircase and a malfunctioning biometric gate. We are still having the same argument: Why was nobody checking before people died?India does not lack building codes, fire regulations or municipal authorities. It lacks consistent enforcement.The response after every tragedy follows a familiar script: compensation, arrests, suspensions, inquiries and promises of stricter enforcement. Then attention moves elsewhere. The regulatory system remains largely reactive – mobilising after a building collapses rather than identifying dangerous buildings before people enter them.The government therefore needs to stop treating student accommodation as an incidental private-market problem.Delhi should establish a dedicated student-housing regulatory mechanism covering private PGs and hostels in major university clusters. Every registered student accommodation should have publicly accessible certification covering structural safety, fire safety, electrical systems, sanitation and maximum occupancy. Inspections should be periodic and genuinely independent, with immediate closure powers where there is an imminent threat to life.But regulation alone will not solve the underlying problem.Delhi University needs a serious, time-bound expansion of affordable hostel capacity, particularly for undergraduate and outstation students. The university and governments must identify land and underused public buildings that can be converted into safe student housing. Affordable accommodation should be treated as educational infrastructure, not as a luxury students are expected to purchase from private landlords.And students already living in unsafe PGs should not have to wait for another disaster. Delhi should conduct an emergency audit of student accommodations in areas such as Satya Niketan, Mukherjee Nagar and other major student hubs, with temporary accommodation provided wherever buildings are found unsafe.The point is not that Delhi should choose students over BRICS.The point is that a city capable of mobilising itself for a summit should also be capable of mobilising itself before a student hostel collapses.India will spend this week presenting itself as a rising global power. That ambition is legitimate. But power is not measured only by the conferences a country can host or the highways it can beautify for foreign delegations. It is also measured by whether an 18-year-old arriving in the capital to study can find a safe place to sleep.Seven people are dead in Satya Niketan. Five were students.Their deaths should not become another statistic followed by another inquiry and another forgotten promise.A capital that can house the world for three days should be able to house its own students safely for three years.Amir Hyder Khan is a Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.