If you are in your early 20s, moving to Delhi for education or work and think that you can finally “party”, far from your home, you have another thing coming. A general inspection by The Sunday Guardian showed that youngsters, students or professionals are the least desirable tenants for property owners, regardless of the location in the city and in the national capital region (NCR).
In the admission season, the Delhi University (DU) receives around 54,000 undergraduate (UG) students. Of these, students belonging to around 10 colleges live in the North Campus area. Yet, the process of letting out rooms to students comes with a long set of terms and conditions. “Some that are easy to rent out, where both the students and the landlords agree to the terms because they are very basic 1 or 2 BHK apartment buildings in Malkaganj and nearby areas. Although if you look for a place in Kamla Nagar, Roop Nagar, Shakti Nagar, it is hard for students and landlords to find a common ground,” says property agent Kalam Mathur who has been operating around the North Campus for over 10 years. “Students want a place where they can exercise their new found freedom, invite friends over, listen to music, come and go at any time. But landlords renting out a floor of their home or their barsatis (room on the terrace) or a part of their house expect their tenants to be quiet, decent and pay the rents on time,” explains Mathur.
“We rented out our place to a second-year student from Hansraj College, a resident of Rajasthan. He appeared decent and talked like someone from a respectable family. We were happy at the first meeting and he paid the rent on time,” recounts Hema Gupta, a landlord from Kamla Nagar who has been renting out the third floor of her house to students for five years. “But soon his friends started coming over and staying at night regularly. The boys would make some noise, play music at night, but it was not that bad and we would just warn him. But one day, the police came apparently because one of the boy’s friends was teasing the girls who lived in the opposite house through the window for weeks. The girls had reported incidents of seeing the guys outside their college and stalking them for hours in Kamla Market,” she recounts half amused, half horrified. Gupta is not alone to recount such tales. Many landlords recount similar tales.
‘One day, the police came to our house because one of the boy’s friends was teasing the girls who lived in the opposite house,’ said a landlady from the North Campus.
BACHELORS NOT ALLOWED
According to landlords in Noida, students from Amity University are as bad when it comes to staying inside the limits. Drug abuse, endless parties, round-the-clock visitors are cited by landlords as reasons for evicting their tenants. “Building societies in Noida mostly have nuclear families or senior citizens who wish to live in a quiet suburban setting not far from Delhi. But when you have college students living next to you, there is a big clash of lifestyles,” says Hemant Kumar, a property dealer who arranges accommodation for many Amity students.
Since Noida is burgeoning commercially, it also attracts a large number of young professionals who need to live close to their offices to increase productivity. But this poses a difficulty as many apartment societies in Noida have gone to the extent of putting up boards outside the gates denying residence to bachelors, Amrapali Sapphire being one of them. The residents’ committees in these societies keep a close watch on the tenants and let apartments only to families or unmarried professionals over the age of 28-30. Anyone below 25 years of age is not allowed any entry. “Societies like Mahagun Moderne, Lotus Boulevard and Amrapali Sapphire are very strict when it comes to renting out apartments to students and young singles,” says Aaraj Rajvanshi, a realtor who works in Noida Sector 71. “We try to accommodate students from Amity and other institutes in Noida in independent builder flats or houses,” Rajvanshi added.
‘It doesn’t make any sense for us to be controlled by our landlord or landlady as long as we are paying our rent on time. The experience of college life is a big part of our education.’
PARTY AND PREJUDICE
Youngsters, too, have reasons to be picky about where they should live. “It doesn’t make any sense for us to be controlled by our landlord or landlady as long as we are paying our rent on time. We have left home to join college in another city, so the experience of college life is a big part of our education,” says Madhu Jain, a third-year student living on North Campus. Jain has had to change four houses in two years. “It was always because of an over protective and intrusive landlord or landlady. The last landlady would not go to sleep till I had come home and when I would return late, she would lecture me no matter how many times I told her that I was not her responsibility,” adds Madhu, still agitated about the experience. She finally found the “right” place when she moved into an independent apartment with two other roommates. The bothers of single girls living alone, however, still continue.
The story in South Delhi with its comparatively modern residential systems is not much different. The high rents here force youngsters to share an accommodation in a group. “When we first came to Delhi, we tried to find a 2 BHK in Malviya Nagar, but four landlords rejected us because they’d rather let out their places to a family or two girls,” says Manish and Ujwal, first year students in DU. “Even after promising that we would not do all those typical things like loud music, parties and girlfriends, they were not ready,” says Ujwal. Both of them then found a place in down market Kirki Extention and are not happy about it. Now they depend on their “party friends” to host parties at his or her house. A party friend is someone in a group who has a place where late night parties and spontaneous hangouts can be arranged freely, without any interruptions from landlords. Kamal is the party friend in Ujwal and Manish’s group. “I like this lifestyle and this is the only time we get to do it. When I was evicted from my first place after my landlord found some cigarette buds in my room, I made very certain to get a landlord-free place,” says Kamal who now shares a 2 BHK apartment in Mayur Vihar Phase 1.
However, as a landlord, Joginder Singh (name changed) points out, he once received a call from his housing society’s guards at 2 am to inform him that his tenants, three boys from Amity University, had organised a party for over 20 people and they were throwing alcohol bottles from the tenth floor of the building. “I had to go there the very next day and the condition of the apartment was beyond description. One of the beer bottles had fallen on a car and dented it; I had to pay for that too. Since then, I am very wary of renting the apartment out to students or young people in general,” said Singh.
“Our landlord had put a camera in the lobby of our building to make sure that no boys were coming to meet any of us,” recounts Preeti, an IT professional from Gurgaon, staying in Vasant Kunj. Her former roommate, Miley from Arunachal Pradesh, faced more trouble, “She had been in Delhi for two years and didn’t have any family here and would get homesick. She got a boyfriend and that eased things for her as he provided emotional support,” Preeti said talking about her former roommate who was asked to leave with just one week’s notice. “Our landlord was racially biased to begin with and when he saw that Miley got a boyfriend, who would occasionally come over late in the night, he just evicted her,” Preeti says.
Along with racial prejudice, there is religious prejudice as well. Many instances of people avoiding or saying an outright no to Muslim youths have been reported from all across Delhi. Mohsin, an MA student from Madhya Pradesh studying at the South Campus of Delhi University, says that finding a place in his first year was very difficult and since then he had had to face similar rejections every time he needed to change houses. “I came here in 2010; it took me a month to find a place and I had to compromise on all the ideas I had about living alone,” he says.