Delhi’s Proposed PG Regulations: What Every PG Owner and Tenant Should Know

Delhi’s paying-guest housing market has exploded over the last few years. Students pour into the city every season for its colleges, universities and coaching hubs, and neighbourhoods like Satya Niketan, Mukherjee Nagar, Rajendra Nagar, Laxmi Nagar and Munirka along with the belts around North and South Campus  have turned into dense, fast-growing PG clusters.

Growth this fast rarely comes with equally fast oversight, and that gap has now become impossible to ignore. The collapse of a five-storey PG building in Satya Niketan, which killed seven residents, forced a hard question into the open: how does Delhi make paying-guest housing safer, more transparent, and more accountable to the people who actually live in it?

The Delhi government’s answer is taking shape as a draft Paying Guest Accommodation Regulation and Welfare Bill. It’s still a work in progress officials have said they’ll consult students, parents, PG operators, civic bodies and other stakeholders before locking anything in, and a final policy is expected to surface over the next month or two. But the direction the draft is pointing in is already clear, and it’s worth understanding now rather than scrambling later.

What the Draft Could Change

1. Registration and licensing become mandatory

Every PG would need to formally register and hold an operating licence, with a 90-day window to get compliant. That process would likely involve police and municipal verification, structural and fire-safety NOCs, and a unique Paying Guest Registration Number (PGRN) for each approved property, listed on a central digital platform. In effect, PGs move from being loosely tracked rentals to formally recognised, traceable businesses.

2. Safety stops being a one-time checkbox

Structural and fire-safety clearances would be part of getting licensed in the first place — but the bigger shift is the expectation that safety is maintained continuously, not just proven once at approval. Regular checks, prompt maintenance, and ongoing documentation are likely to matter as much as the initial audit.

3. Security requirements get more specific

The draft outlines functional CCTV at entrances and common areas, footage retention of at least 30 days, visitor logs, and licensed night guards for any PG housing 15 or more residents. It also proposes a warden requirement  someone based within 500 metres of the property who can respond to an emergency within 15 minutes. Security, in other words, would stop being a discretionary add-on and start being a structural requirement.

4. Rent and deposits could come under a formal framework

A proposed Rent Regulation Committee would set area-wise rent bands. Alongside that, the draft floats capping security deposits and advances at three months’ rent, requiring deposit refunds within 30 days of a tenant vacating, banning rent discrimination based on gender, caste, religion or state of origin, and introducing a standard notice period for move-outs. For an industry that has historically run on verbal understanding and inconsistent paperwork, this would be a significant tightening.

A Government Portal for Verification

One of the more consequential pieces of the draft is a proposed GovPG portal — a central place where registered PGs would list their registration status, capacity, rent, facilities, security arrangements and compliance record, and where students could file complaints, including anonymously.

If it comes together as described, it changes how students shop for housing. Instead of relying on brokers, word of mouth or unverifiable listings, they’d be able to check a property’s status before ever visiting it which raises the bar for owners to actually have their paperwork and practices in order.

Complaints Get a Formal Channel

The draft also proposes an Institutional Accommodation Committee (IAC)  bringing together faculty, student representatives, municipal officials and a police liaison — with a role in inspections and grievance resolution. Complaint handling would move away from being a WhatsApp message that quietly disappears, toward something closer to a tracked pipeline: raised, assigned, actioned, resolved.

What Owners Can Do Right Now

The Bill isn’t final, so there’s no fixed checklist to comply with yet. But there’s also no reason to wait to clean up the basics:

• Get records in order. Tenant details, rent history, deposits, occupancy and property documents should be organised and easy to pull up not scattered across registers, spreadsheets and phone notes.
• Track complaints, don’t just receive them. A maintenance issue should have a visible status: reported, assigned, fixed. If you can’t answer “where does this stand?” in ten seconds, it’s not being tracked.
• Watch for repeat problems. The same leak coming back three times usually means the root cause was never fixed — treat recurring complaints as a signal, not a nuisance.
• Build for scale, not just for today. Manual processes that work for a ten-room PG break down fast once you’re running multiple properties with more staff and more tenants.

Where LinkPG Fits In

At LinkPG, this is exactly the kind of shift our zero-brokerage, managed-living model is built around. We already work with owners and tenants on verified listings, structured onboarding and organised property operations across 12+ cities  the same fundamentals a more formal regulatory regime would expect from any serious operator.

If Delhi’s PG sector is heading toward more registration, tighter safety oversight, regulated rent and deposit practices, and real grievance mechanisms, the owners and platforms who are already operating transparently won’t need to scramble to catch up. That’s the model LinkPG has been building toward from day one  verified properties, zero brokerage, and a system tenants and owners can actually trust.

The final Bill will take a few more months to arrive. The habits that will matter once it does  clean records, responsive maintenance, fair and documented rent practices — are worth building today.