Boom to bust: Gurugram’s illegal PG business faces crackdown
It was a quiet Saturday morning on June 20. Sanghamitra Pati was at her home in Bhubaneswar when her phone rang. “Do ghante mein room khali kar do, building seal ho rahi hai (Vacate the room in two hours. The building is being sealed),” the caretaker of her rented accommodation in Gurugram’s DLF Phase 3 told her. Minutes later, her landlord repeated the message. The 26-year-old marketing manager initially dismissed it as a prank. She called back to check. The answer was the same. Officials were on their way to seal the building in S Block. She had two hours to empty her one-bedroom apartment. Hundreds of kilometres away, with keys to the flat in her bag, there was little she could do. She called a friend in Gurugram and asked him to break into the apartment and salvage whatever he could. It was the beginning of a scramble that, in the weeks that followed, upended the lives of hundreds of tenants caught in Gurugram’s crackdown on unauthorised paying guest (PG) accommodations and illegally converted …
