Students from the State who are studying in Delhi have flagged the issue of their inability to pay rent in lumpsum against the backdrop of COVID-19 whenever they return to the national capital to resume their studies.
The Delhi government had on April 22 issued an order waiving one month’s rent on students’ accommodation and making their forcible eviction an offence under the Disaster Management Act after students’ groups wrote to the Delhi government seeking their intervention. Maithri, a Kerala students’ fraternity, had written to the Kerala Chief Minister too.
While the order has stopped the barrage of threatening phone calls from landlords asking for rent, some of the students from the State say with the lockdown getting extended, the waiver of one month rent would help them only to an extent.
Room rent factor
A student from Kollam who lives in a rented flat along with another girl from Alappuzha says they have to pay ₹7,000 a month as room rent alone. Her father is a cancer patient and mother runs a shop which too is taken on rent and she worries about the rent she will have to pay when she goes back.
Her roommate says her stepfather has lost his job in the Gulf and her mother too is not employed. Without any source of income, she cannot afford to pay the rent in bulk.
Government order
Another student who puts up in a private hostel near the Delhi varsity campus says they paid the rent of ₹8,000 for March, but the hostel is seeking fees for April and May, claiming that the Delhi government order is not applicable to them.
A security deposit of ₹15,000 that the students had paid initially remains with the hostel authorities.
Amal K. Simon, president of Maithri, the Kerala students’ fraternity in the university, says that with their families’ livelihoods getting affected in the wake of the lockdown, many students are in a fix over what to do about the rent beyond what has been waived.
There is also the question of whether the students should pay the rent at all when they return. The Delhi government order does not say anything about paying rent to the landlords either.
Govt. intervention
“We are hoping that the Kerala government intervenes or the Delhi government pays part of the rent so that students are not burdened and the landlords too do not feel the pinch,” he says.
