India, Sept. 13 -- The visibility of a city's unevenness after Satya Niketan is a pattern we have all seen before. A tragedy, photo ops for ministers and officials, a reel of someone being scolded, and then the arrival of the "Peela Panja" - the yellow claw, the bulldozer.

Satya Niketan brings to your face a student housing crisis that the city does not acknowledge. No annual record from official sources tracks this population. One has to imagine it instead: from Delhi University to Jawaharlal Nehru University, IIT-Delhi to AIIMS, IGNOU to South Asian University, students arriving from across India and beyond. University housing does not come close to accommodating them.

What fills the gap is a paying guest and hostel economy that is da...