It was not an accident. It was an apocalypse manufactured by bureaucratic indifference, administrative apathy, and money-hungry politicians who treat student housing as a private cash machine. Life before that afternoon and life after it are two different countries. Thousands of Delhi University students and their parents now carry a permanent weight of dread and collective elegy. We watched the rescue teams arrive two hours late, then work with shocking inefficiency, in the heart of the national capital. We hung our heads in shame because we could do nothing except share videos and wait.
I can testify, from daily experience, to the complete absence of basic student facilities and the political nexus that protects this rot across Satya Niketan and much of Delhi. Delhi University’s hostel capacity has never kept pace with enrolment. Students like me are forced into such overpriced, overcrowded, filthy accommodation that routinely ignore safety norms. Critical warnings — the need for new institutions, the collapse of hostel infrastructure, the faulty drainage that killed an IAS aspirant in Rajendra Nagar last year — were ignored because politicians themselves profit from the same broken system. When the local politician is the beneficiary, no construction rule is enforced, no structural audit is serious, and no MCD official dares question his political master. Quid pro quo is the operating principle. Students and parents pay the price in rent and, now, in blood.
Death traps
The cruel moment the building came down, a party office was being inaugurated. That detail lodged itself in our minds like glass. Why must politicians and their parties occupy free, prime-location buildings while thousands of students live in death traps? Why can political parties, flush with crores in donations and election bonds, not run their offices from ordinary rented spaces? Why can those same free, taxpayer-funded offices and the sprawling Lutyens bungalows occupied by seasoned politicians and bureaucrats not be converted, immediately, into free hostels for Delhi University students, especially girls and students from rural, marginalised, and Divyang backgrounds? These buildings were built with public money. Asking politicians to live for a while the way their voters’ children live is not a sacrifice. It is the bare minimum of justice.If that is too radical for them, then nationalise every PG accommodation the way China dismantled its private coaching industry overnight in 2021. Bring all student accommodation under Delhi University. Or create, by an Act of Parliament, a student accommodation Board with real power, led by students and university administration. No PG accommodation should operate without the Board’s registration. Violation should be a non-bailable offence. Rent caps must be enforced. Ownership of every PG accommodation must be disclosed in the public domain. Allocation must be transparent — by merit or lottery. Politicians must be barred from the PG business entirely and brought under land-ceiling rules. Possession of land above the limit by politicians should invite the same treatment as an office of profit: immediate disqualification.
For this specific crime, attempt-to-murder cases must be registered against the MCD Commissioner. He should be arrested, dismissed from service under Article 311, and his political boss sacked. Anything less is theatre. These students died of a system built to protect power, not people.
The previous Delhi government once allocated 24.2% of its Budget to education. Under the current government of the GNCTD that figure has fallen to 19.29% in 2025-26. The cut is not abstract. It is measured in cracked beams and young bodies under rubble. Every State and the Centre must commit at least 25% of their Budgets to education and enforce the systemic reforms that money alone cannot buy.
Eclipsed by politics
As long as the electoral system rewards those who treat students as disposable tenants rather than the future of the country, we will keep demanding basic safety while parties wait for the next campaign cycle. The politics of the ruling establishment continues to eclipse the absence of affordable, safe PG accommodation and the ruinous quality of infrastructure that houses the young.We stand at a crossroads. Either the state prioritises the accommodation and survival of students, or it continues to protect the privileges of the politicians who own the very buildings that kill them. The several who died were bright students with dreams and parents who trusted this city. Their deaths are not statistics. They are an indictment. If the system does not change after this catastrophe, then the system has chosen its side. We, the living students of Delhi University, will not forget which side that was. And we shall also remember the famous slogan painted on the walls in Paris in 1968 student protests, “Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible (Be realistic, demand the impossible)”.
Bhoomi Goyal is an undergraduate student at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi