Ruchika Mehra, 24, a news researcher, recalls hearing her mother, Aradhana Mehra, 49, speak fondly about the barsati she had rented in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar way back in 1997. Her nostalgic stories painted pictures of barbecue nights, jam sessions, and early morning chai on the terrace. The two-room set was just right for someone starting out in life and single in the city, as Ms. Ruchika was, in an architecture firm. It worked from both an economic and strategic perspective: people could stay in a tony south Delhi neighbourhood at a pocket-permitting rent.
But when Ms. Ruchika herself moved from Lucknow to Delhi in November 2022, she found that renting one was now either a luxury or a liability, as barsatis themselves were. They were either too expensive, with rents touching Rs 80,000 or they were affordable at about Rs 10,000, but with seepage, cockroaches, and dodgy house owners.
“Twenty years ago, we would deal in 20 to 30 barsatis a year; now we find five or six,” says Siddharth Gargi, a real estate agent in Nizamuddin East, a stone’s throw away from the 16th century Humayun’s Tomb, a UNESCO World Heritage Centre.
The word barsati which borrows from the Urdu word barsat (heavy rain), is a room built on the terrace of an independent bungalow. “ Barsatis occupied almost a third of the terrace. They started out as rooms for storage and sometimes as quarters for help,” says Ranjan Choubey, a real estate agent with about 30 years of experience, working out of Jangpura, an area that still has low-rise homes. In time, especially in the 80s and 90s, they morphed into cool city pads, when the Delhi skyline was not dominated by concrete.
Once home to authors and artists like Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, William Dalrymple, and M.F. Husain, barsatis in Delhi are a rare sight now.
This is primarily because of a change in the Delhi Development Authority’s (DDA) housing by-laws in 2013 which allowed houses to construct four floors from the earlier two floors. In 2014, the Urban Development ministry increased the floor area ratio (FAR: the measurement of a home’s floor area to the size of the plot) from 150% to 200% on 750-1,000 square metre plots and from 120% to 200% for plots of 1,000 square metres and above.
Real estate companies entered with redevelopment plans. Mr. Gargi, who has been in the business for two decades now, says that house owners collaborated with builders to remodel their two-storey houses to three- or floor-storey buildings. “This would allow the house owners to have one extra floor even after giving one floor to the builders. They would also benefit in terms of rental returns, as in comparison to barsatis, apartments would have much higher rents,” he added.
A senior DDA official said that building barsatis is now deemed illegal. However, the DDA Building Bylaws remain silent on the barsatis that are already in place. Taking advantage of this ‘grey area’, Mr. Gargi said that many builders now use temporary structures to build a room on the terrace, which can be assembled and dismantled in a couple of days. “These house owners then turn such space into boutique rooms and rent it out for more than Rs. 40,000 in localities like Defence Colony, Green Park and Nizamuddin East”, added Mr. Gargi.
Homes built mostly in post-partition allocated land – Green Park, Greater Kailash, Defence Colony, Lajpat Nagar, Nizamuddin East – were suddenly not accessible to the upwardly mobile migrants.
For Amarjeet Rana, renting a barsati was an economically motivated choice. “In the spring of 2015 when my friend and I were house hunting in South Delhi, with our limited budget we could only find a barsati in Malviya Nagar,” said the 27-year-old research scholar. He recollects enjoying the cool breeze and watching the flowering amaltas trees in spring, but also having a tough time with the leaky roof during the monsoon, followed by a termite infestation which finally pushed him to a budget friendly apartment in Humayunpur.
The barsatis that do exist are either boutique studio apartments or illegal constructions, sometimes atop DDA flats or in Delhi’s urban villages where buildings seem to run into each other. “Considering the legality of barsatis in South Delhi continue to remain a grey area, many house owners have tried benefitting from it by building modular temporary rooms on the top of the terrace as they bypass the jurisdiction of the DDA,” says a senior lawyer. However, areas like Khirki Extension, some parts of Jangpura and Kotla that fall under the Lal Dora land, do not fall under the DDA laws. Builders don’t have to adhere to building bylaws, he added. So, barsatis today are in the more congested parts of town.
Mehender Arora, 62, who owns a house in Amar Colony, with a barsati on the fourth floor says, “Most tenants now want modern, new rooms that look like hotel rooms, but on a budget,” he says. This makes it difficult to rent out ageing barsatis, many of which are now yellow with age.
In the meantime, Ms. Ruchika has realised that disappointments are as much a part of adulting as having a cool pad is. She now shares a three-bedroom apartment in a gated colony in Malviya Nagar.
