Hostels in Chennai are seeing demand for rooms picking up following the relaxation of e-passes for travel, with those who had left the city due to the COVID-19 pandemic now returning. However, to prevent the disease from spreading, hostel owners are mulling several strict measures which include producing a COVID-19 negative certificate.
Gayathri Mohan, the owner of Men’s PG in Velachery, says she expects several of the occupants who had left in March to return in a phased manner by September 15. “I had 350 residents earlier, but now I just have three of them. Three of them are residents from other states and were stuck in Chennai due to the lockdown and they decided to prolong their stay in our hostel,” she says.
Noting that it’s been hard to sustain the business since the lockdown began in March, Gayathri says she hopes to reopen the hostel as soon as possible. However, she realises that when she reopens, it cannot be business as usual in the wake of the ongoing pandemic. She says she will insist on occupants submitting a COVID-19 negative certificate before renting out a room.
In addition, she says that those staying as a paying guest will also have to produce a quarantine completion certificate. “People who had left for their native places should finish their quarantine period and come back with proof of it. I am also planning to instruct them to mandatorily use sanitizers when they enter and exit the hostel premises,” she says, adding that the government must frame rules for hostels and paying guest accommodations to follow.
Gayathri says as a first step to accommodating occupants once again, she has sanitised the hostel. “Since the coronavirus cases have started to reduce, I have sanitized the whole hostel and now I am waiting for September. I am in talks with few residents and some more people have also shown interest to join but I am scared to accommodate them.”
She had more than five hostels around Velachery and Adyar area, but owing to losses she had to shut down two of her units. However, Gayathri is hopeful that her business will bounce back as several employees are unable to pay house rent as their flatmates have left for their native place, and are now turning to hostels or PG accomodations.
Like Gayathri, Vijayarakavan, a hostel owner from Coimbatore says that he will also introduce a similar policy of providing accomodation only after an occupant provides a COVID-19 negative certificate.
Vijayarakavan was running the hostel with a handful of occupants even during the peak of the pandemic. He says that it is an arduous task to monitor the residents and encourage them to use masks and sanitisers. He points out that it is extremely difficult to run the hostel during the pandemic without suffering losses and not compromising on safety as well.
“Hostels cannot convert a room which is meant to be shared by four or five persons into a room that will be shared by two,since such a step will result in complete losses. Increasing the rent also is not an option to compensate for it, since many are facing pay-cuts. So ensuring physical distancing becomes challenging,” Vijayarakavan points out.
Hostel owners also worry about losing years of goodwill and reputation if any occupant ends up testing positive for the coronavirus. This has forced many to postpone reopening of hostels to December.
Kannan*, the owner of Elite Ladies Hostel in Mylapore says, “There is no guarantee that new occupants or people stepping out for work may not be the carriers of the virus. Also, there is a risk of COVID-19 infection even if we step out of the home, so I am thinking of not opening the hostel. The government is also not clearly telling us the exact situation so I am planning to open only by year end or once the vaccine is found.”
Since facilities have incurred heavy losses owing to the pandemic, hostel owners appeal to the government to provide a temporary aid or waiver in the electricity bill.
“The government should consider our plight, we are unable to pay the rent already and have closed down a few units of the hotels. Yet we are forced to pay the commercial electricity bill for the past six months without any occupants. So the government should look into this and provide us assistance or should give any waiver to tide over the crisis,” Gayathri says.