Satya Niketan: from Mochi Gaon to PG hub

Circa 1988, on Ring Road, not far from Dhaula Kuan and the gurudwara, Mochi Gaon was a sleepy village. During winters, women would sit outside their small homes to enjoy the sunshine, while goats were reared in nearly every household.

Long before Satya Niketan appeared on maps, people knew this part of South Delhi by older names. It was called Arakpur Bagh Mochi, later becoming known as Mochi Bagh and Mochi Gaon. Old Mughal-era records compiled by Maulavi Zafar Hasan in 1919 describe a walled garden with towers at its corners, a large gate on the eastern side and a tank. It had been built during the reign of Emperor Jahangir by a man named Ramdas, known as Mochi, the son of Malukchand of Rohtak. Over time, villagers built mud houses within the old garden walls.

Today, however, Satya Nikaten attracts far more attention. On the afternoon of September 6, a five-storey paying-guest building in Satya Niketan collapsed within seconds, killing at least seven people. Rescue teams worked through the night in lanes so narrow that large machines could not enter. 

Changing with the times

The tragedy has also drawn attention to how dramatically the area has changed over the decades. Planned as a simple resettlement colony, Satya Niketan was gradually transformed by its location, growing student demand and the financial opportunities created by rental accommodation. The result was a neighbourhood that came to accommodate far more people and construction than its small plots and modest houses had originally been designed for.

The transformation of the wider area had begun much earlier. In the 1950s, as Chanakyapuri developed, officials felt that the name Mochi Bagh sounded unsuitable for the new government housing coming up nearby, and it was changed to Moti Bagh. What remained of the old settlement was a stretch of fields and small houses. 

Veteran journalist Sunil Negi, who lived in Nanakpura, close to Satya Niketan, for several decades, remembers a village life in which many families kept animals, including goats. That picture is difficult to find in official records and survives largely in local memory.

In the late 1960s, the Delhi Development Authority laid out Satya Niketan under the Jhuggi Jhopri Removal scheme, one of the early, large-scale efforts to move slum families onto prepared plots. The plots were small by South Delhi standards, often measuring about 40 square metres, or about 55 square yards, although some accounts put them at between 60 and 65 square metres. The original building rules allowed only a ground floor and one floor above it. 

“My brother purchased a house in Satya Niketan in the early 2000s as my family was expanding. The main reason for the purchase was the very good location in South Delhi. Moreover, the old order was fading fast. Things were more or less fine then. Slowly, people foresaw a huge opportunity if they converted their houses into PGs. They were proved right. Thousands of students started moving into PGs. That changed the very character of the area,” says shopkeeper Rajesh Sharma, who still has family living in Satya Niketan. 

The PG boom

The arrival and expansion of Delhi University’s South Campus added another powerful force to this transformation. The university opened its South Campus in 1973 and later shifted it near Dhaula Kuan. Across Ring Road and San Martin Marg came colleges such as Sri Venkateswara, Jesus and Mary, Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma, Maitreyi and Motilal Nehru. Hostel capacity, however, never kept pace with the growing number of students.

In 2024-25, Delhi University had more than 2.45 lakh regular students but only a limited number of university hostel seats. For students arriving from outside Delhi, neighbourhoods close to South Campus, particularly Satya Niketan, became an obvious alternative.

“At first, property owners rented spare rooms. Then they added beds, shared toilets and extra floors. Photocopy shops, coaching rooms, messes and cafés mushroomed. The colony became a student town stretching from Ring Road and Nanakpura to the South Campus,” says Dr Manish Choudhary, who teaches Hindi at Delhi University.

As demand grew, the economics of the neighbourhood changed. Many of the first allottees sold or leased their plots, while those who remained realised that a property next to South Campus was no longer simply a home but a potentially lucrative source of rental income. A bed could fetch between Rs 12,000 and Rs 15,000 a month. Two or three students often shared tiny rooms, while several rooms on a floor could depend on just two bathrooms.

Cracks in the model

Companies and brands, including Hostel Daze, also took buildings on lease and advertised “safe” rooms located only a few steps from college. More than 200 PGs eventually came to fill the neighbourhood. Old families gradually moved out. One man who grew up in the area recalls that even 25 years ago, it was still largely residential, with only a handful of PGs. Today, only a few of the original households remain.

Another important change came in 2011-12, when residents of around 45 resettlement colonies, including Satya Niketan, were allowed to convert leasehold land into freehold by paying a proportion of the circle rate.

“It became easier to sell a house, take a loan or split floors. Checks by the civic body did not keep up. The allowed height was low, but buildings rose to five and six floors. Many also added basements that the old foundations were not made to carry,” says Dr Devinder Gupta, a real estate consultant in South Delhi.

Concerns about unsafe construction were not entirely new. In April 2022, a building undergoing repairs in the same colony collapsed, killing two workers. The September 6 collapse followed a broadly similar pattern, though with far more serious consequences. The building stood on a tiny plot and had a basement as well as several floors. It reportedly had no fire clearance, and work was underway below when the structure came down.

Satya Niketan’s transformation, therefore, cannot be understood through any single factor. The colony sits on Ring Road and is within walking distance of South Campus. College hostels remain limited, while freehold rights made property easier to trade and develop. High rents, meanwhile, created strong incentives to accommodate every additional bed possible.

Together, these forces transformed land originally planned for low-rise homes into a dense student housing market. What was once Mochi Gaon — a landscape of gardens and fields and, in local memory, goats — later became a JJ colony of small houses before evolving into the crowded student neighbourhood that Satya Niketan is today.

The September 6 collapse has now brought renewed scrutiny to this transformation and to the enforcement of building regulations in the area. Whether it leads to sustained action against illegal and unsafe construction in Satya Niketan and elsewhere in Delhi remains to be seen.

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