With students away from Delhi University for almost two years, several businesses in North Campus which had developed around their needs – paying guest accommodations, tiffin services to photocopiers – took a severe hit. As the varsity reopens next week, they hope things will start to look up now.
After news of the university reopening on February 17 broke on Wednesday, Rohit Rana’s phone started buzzing from 4 pm till well past midnight with messages and calls from students. He runs Anand Bhawan, a popular men’s PG in Vijay Nagar near North Campus, and said that 50% of the 66 seats have already been booked. In fact, some eager and anxious students and their parents made bookings as early as last February.
“The first booking was made last February. Whenever the university had given the slightest indication that it might move towards reopening, people made bookings by paying one month’s rent as a confirmation rent,” he said.
Some of the students who were staying in the PG when the national lockdown had been imposed in 2020 continued to stay on till July, till they could get transport to return. That was followed by 18 months of a complete pause of the business.
“Students who were in the first year at that time and had gone home had left most of their luggage behind, which we’ve kept without any charges for the last one and a half years. Now they’ll return and stay for three months, after which they’ll graduate,” he exclaimed, adding that, “Things seem to be picking up again in the last few days though students are still trying to figure out things like where they ‘re supposed to spend their three days’ isolation period.”
Areas around North Campus are home to a large number of businesses which have developed directly as a response to the needs of thousands of students studying and living there. The PG economy, in particular, had been booming for at least a decade with the influx of large numbers of students from outside Delhi to colleges with limited hostel capacity — till the pandemic struck. With their clientele absent for almost two years, many of these looked to other customer bases.
“This market developed massively in the last 10 years, but I think only around 30% of the previous capacity of rooms are ready to cater to students right now,” said Vikas Bansal, vice-president of the Delhi Student Housing Association, an association of property and PG owners and students.
He also runs a large PG business of his own in North Campus. “Before Covid, my business had capacity for 500 students. During the pandemic, we converted around 150 seats for family stay or for use of the hotel industry. So now, we have capacity for 350. Now that bookings have started, I am expecting that not less than 100 bookings will be made by the weekend. Once these 350 are filled, I hope to convert the other rooms back for PG use. That’s more lucrative. We earn like commercial properties on residential properties,” he said.
Other businesses have also turned to other customers. Shanki Jain had started Batman Tiffin Services in 2017 to home deliver meals to student areas such as Vijay Nagar, Hudson Lane, Kamla Nagar, Malkaganj, and Mukherjee Nagar. He said that he had 370 clients before the pandemic, after which business dried up.
“Once offices started opening again, I changed my business to supply lunches in offices. But the number of clients is much lower, around 170, because of the areas to which I cater. I haven’t started getting queries from students; that might start after they identify where they’re going to stay,” he said.
Much older than all these businesses are the printing and photocopying shops lined up in Patel Chest. Garvit, who runs Daljeet Photocopy Store, said that the shop has been running for around 30 years and that the last two years have brought them the poorest business they have ever had, at around 25% of pre-pandemic business.
Ishan Sharma, who runs Arun Thesis, doubts that it will be back to business as usual with the return of students to campus. “An even bigger impact than that of universities and markets being opened and closed will be that of so much college work having gone online. We feel that there is a shift. The kind of crowd that used to be there earlier won’t be there, I think the printing and photocopying requirements will be less,” he said.
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