Noida: Across Mamura, Chhalera, Sadarpur and Rasoolpur Nawada villages, multi-storey buildings offering cheap, one-room paying guest (PG) accommodations have come up on land zoned for no more than two floors, rising instead to six, seven and even nine storeys. Rooftops of adjoining buildings nearly touch each other across the narrow lanes, with a web of power cables dangling between them, leaving little room for fire engines or emergency vehicles to move in case of a blaze. The columns, which should measure at least 9×9 inches, are often visibly thinner, raising questions about their load-bearing capacity.After the death of seven persons in the Sept 6 collapse of a five-storey building, ‘Hostel Daze’, in Delhi’s Satya Niketan, which was being operated illegally as a private PG accommodation primarily housing Delhi University South Campus students, TOI visited the city’s densely packed PG belts and found that most of these buildings have no fire or emergency exits. Those that do have one have either blocked them or built them too narrow to be of use. Most of these PGs also have no functional fire-safety equipment or evacuation procedures, in violation of the National Building Code (NBC), 2016.Many of these villages fall under the abadi, or Lal Dora, category, over which Noida Authority’s jurisdiction is limited mainly to municipal services. While Authority rules permit construction of only ground-plus-one, or a maximum of two floors with a 15-metre height limit, for residential use in these areas, officials said the enforcement gap allowed large-scale, unauthorised vertical construction to continue unchecked.Noida Authority general manager (planning) Meena Bhargava told TOI that PG accommodations in notified villages were illegal unless a lease deed specifically permitted such use. “The accommodations in villages are for residential purposes. Any flouting of rules is handled by the engineering department of the Authority, which carries out periodic checks and takes action as per the laid-out rules,” she said.Enforcement, however, is complicated by an administrative vacuum that has persisted since 2015, when the panchayat and zilla parishad system, earlier responsible for approving village building plans, was scrapped. The three tehsil offices in Dadri, Noida Sadar and Jewar, meant to handle documentation for villagers on rural land, have instead become sites for registering flats and apartments built with a near-total disregard for applicable building norms. “PGs or hostels come under the residential category and should be designed as per NBC norms, which require fire exits and fire detection provisions,” Anil Bansal of Vastunidhi Architects said.Another Noida-based architect said land use in the villages was limited to residential purposes, with a floor area ratio (FAR) cap of 1.8, or 180% of the plot area including all floors, which is routinely breached. “In reality, PGs and hostels are the only source of income for the villagers and hence have seen rampant vertical scale-up,” he said.While the pursuit of rental income has overridden structural safety considerations in most buildings, the scale of construction has been driven largely by demand from the city’s expanding IT and student population, for whom affordable formal housing remains scarce. Ranjan Tomar, president of the Noida Village Residents Association, said most PGs charge Rs 8,000 to 10,000 a month and cater largely to students and IT professionals.Tenants living in these buildings, meanwhile, were found largely unfazed by the structural risks. Nimisha Thakur (21), who lives in a PG in Mamura village, said affordability, not safety documentation, had driven her choice of accommodation.Like her, Anubha Anand Mishra, a student at Amity University who lives in an all-girls PG in Chhalera village, said her primary concern was an “affordable, convenient and safe” accommodation. The 22-year-old said she too had not put much thought into the building’s structural clearance. “I pay Rs 9,500 a month for a room in an all-girls PG, food and a cooler in a house where the landlady lives on the ground floor and lets out four or five rooms upstairs. It suits my pocket as there are only girls in the building,” she said. A one-BHK in a housing society would have cost her more than Rs 20,000. “Gated societies are not always welcoming to girls living alone,” she added.Mohammad Shoib, who works at a multinational company in Sector 64 while pursuing a diploma in pharmacy at Sharda University, said he preferred to share a PG room for just Rs 10,000, instead of shelling Rs 25,000 for a flat in a high-rise society with swimming pool and gym facilities that he would rarely get to use.TOI found that most property owners managed their PGs from Delhi or other cities, letting local lessees run the day-to-day business. In Sadarpur village, neighbours told TOI that some PG owners had taken down their signboards in the days after the Delhi collapse, though rows of densely packed rooms remained visible along the lanes.At Rao Shab PG and Rooms in Mamura, a front desk employee, who declined to give his name, said the property offered single-, double- and triple-sharing rooms for Rs 13,000, Rs 8,000 and Rs 6,500, respectively, each with a bed, fan, Wi-Fi, cupboard, power backup and food, but did not respond to questions on fire-safety provisions.
