Delhi court refuses bail to PG operator after Satya Niketan collapse

Students in the neighbourhood said the building had stood unused for a couple of years before being leased out last year to three men who ran its day-to-day operations.

Nobody has given a figure for how many people were inside. Eyewitnesses told Indian media that between two and four dozen were in the building; no official count has been released, and hospital officials have not said whether the casualties were students, local residents or labourers working in the basement. A local MLA at the scene on the day said some of the trapped students had been making calls from beneath the rubble.

Rescue work ran for more than a day. Teams from the National Disaster Response Force cut through iron grilles and layers of steel and concrete with electric saws while an excavator worked through the brick. By Monday morning, Gupta said, roughly 80 per cent of the debris had been cleared and only the basement rubble remained. Twelve people were taken to hospital.

A shopkeeper nearby told the news agency ANI that the collapse sounded "like the rumble of an earthquake", and that after the dust cleared some bodies were recovered and four students were rescued.

Five in custody

The investigation has widened well beyond the one bail application. Police arrested Sudhanshu, another of the accommodation's operators, and on 8 September detained a labour contractor, Sanoj, at Kasganj in Uttar Pradesh.

On 7 September a Delhi court sent Hariram, a former Indian Air Force sergeant, and his wife Urmila to 14 days' judicial custody, while their son Mahesh was remanded to police custody for two days. The property was registered in Urmila's name; Hariram and Mahesh were involved in running it. Mahesh told investigators he handled the building's maintenance on his parents' behalf.

Police are examining the role of the leaseholders and the construction and repair work being carried out in the basement and on the ground floor, along with allegations of unauthorised construction. The building owner has been arrested and five senior officials of the Delhi Municipal Corporation suspended.

The sequence police are reconstructing is narrow but consequential: who commissioned the basement work, who approved it, and whether anyone with authority over the building knew that water had been collecting in it. The chief minister has already named both factors as the cause; establishing who was responsible for each is what the arrests are for.

The buildings still standing

The response has extended to the surrounding streets. The municipal corporation has begun a sealing drive, nearby hostels and paying-guest houses are being evacuated, and the building next to the collapsed one is being demolished on safety grounds. The chief minister has ordered a scrutiny of records on illegal construction.

That is the part of the story that outlasts the arrests. Satya Niketan is student housing built around a university campus, occupied by people who do not own the buildings they live in and are rarely in a position to ask what was done to the basement. The Delhi High Court has issued notice on a plea seeking safety audits of paying-guest accommodation and more university hostels.

Anticipatory bail is sought by someone who expects to be arrested. In refusing it, the magistrate has left Tyagi exposed to arrest in a case where five people connected to the building are already in custody. A court will decide in time whether any of them is responsible. The collapse itself has already answered a different question: how much of the housing around a Delhi campus was ever checked.