Around 40-50 students are feared trapped under the rubble after a boys’ hostel building collapsed in New Delhi in India around Sunday noon.

Six have been rescued from under the rubble and three of them are in critical condition, said officials at the trauma centre of All India Institute of Medical Science’s Delhi unit, reports Hindustan Times.

Police, the Fire Service and a number of civil defence forces have joined the rescue operation.

Police said the building was a hostel, and students were staying there on rent. “Several vehicles parked around the building were also damaged in the collapse,” the official said.

A police official at the site, citing preliminary inquiry, said that around 40-50 students are suspected to have been inside the building at the time of the collapse.

According to locals in the area, the collapsed building was a boys’ PG. An eyewitness reportedly told news agency ANI that the five-storey building was called “Hostel Daze”, a dedicated boys’ hostel.

“The adjacent building also collapsed… All the students in their rooms were trapped under the rubble. We will only know the exact number of trapped students by checking the registration records,” the eyewitness told the news agency. He added that many students have suffered severe injuries, adding that rescuers are working to pull them out with great difficulty.

Students in the vicinity claimed that, since it was Sunday, most students would have been inside the building at the time of the incident.

In a statement, Chief Minister Rekha Gupta said: “Deeply concerned by the building collapse incident at Satya Niketan, RK Puram.”

A similar incident took place in the same area in the Indian capital in 2022, when two people were killed and several others injured. The terrace of a three-storey house undergoing renovation collapsed at around noon., trapping six workers. The workers remained trapped for hours as teams from the Delhi Fire Services, Delhi Police and National Disaster Response Force worked to remove the debris and rescue them.