Coping with 54°C heat: Delhi slum diaries detail what it’s like to live in extreme temperatures | global development

MyEvery summer afternoon, Gulshan follows the same routine. He washes the floor of his one-room house several times so that it cools down a little so that his four children can sleep there. Last summer, the family saved enough to buy a portable refrigerator, which uses evaporation as a cheaper alternative to air conditioning.

The family uses the appliance with caution to save energy costs. But even when it’s on, Gulshan, who doesn’t use a last name, has to dampen everyone’s clothes before going to sleep. The 39-year-old woman and her children now have skin rashes and one of them has a skin infection from the wet cloth on his skin.

This summer, Gulshan began writing down these coping strategies in a garmi jataor heat log. “I feel relieved that at least someone can read my family’s experiences,” she says.

They are one of 40 households in Sunder Nagri, a slum in northeast Delhi, documenting their experiences of surviving the city’s increasingly long and frequent heat waves.

In recent years, cities across India have begun developing heat action plans: agreements formulated by a municipal or district administration on how to prepare for and respond to extreme heat.

While some incorporate data such as satellite-derived land surface temperatures to identify heat hotspots, there are still significant gaps in information about people, making it difficult to understand how heat is experienced differently in different communities.

Aravind Unni, an urban planner and researcher in Delhi, says: “Experiences of heat are very different depending on geography, income, occupation, gender, caste and class.

“While we have some meteorological data on the heat, what’s completely missing is the people, the community: what they feel, what they experience.”

Most data collected in heat planning is usually meteorological only, such as air temperature and heat wave thresholds. The idea of the heat diaries was to “go beyond the numbers,” says Nibedita Saha, a Greenpeace India researcher who worked on the project.

Aakiz Farooq, one of the group’s main activists, says the team contemplated how best to summarize the experiences and thinking: “What if they become their own narrators, write their own evidence, write their own testimonies?”

Arshi, 19, who lives in a room with five other family members, is a distance education student at Delhi University. He also works at home making decorative tassels for trucks.

He earns about 150 rupees (£1.17) working with his mother and sister for a day. “Sometimes I go to the university library just to sit for a while in the air-conditioned space. But I have to go home so I can help my sister and mother,” he says. These experiences are part of Arshi’s diary.

The diaries, which ask about daily routines, work, home, mood, and families, are intended to serve as comprehensive diaries of residents’ daily lives.

Arshi’s small brick house is extremely humid, and although the temperatures are lower after the rain, the combination of heat and humidity makes everyone sweat profusely.

The indoor ambient air temperature is 85°F (29.3°C), but at 84.6% relative humidity, the “sensitive” temperature is 97°F (36.3°C).

Raja, a 21-year-old street vendor, experiences temperatures of up to 45°C during the peak summer months while selling vegetables from his cart. Fresh produce spoils quickly, causing losses, and he has noticed a drastic drop in the number of people on the streets, which also reduces his income.

Every night he returns to a house with limited ventilation and no source of cooling beyond a ceiling fan. As the gap between day and night temperatures narrows year by year in Delhi, people in homes like Raja’s have no respite even after the sun sets. “I started sleeping on the roof in May so I could get some air,” he says.

Workers like Raja, Unni says, could be better protected by public policies if the state knew about their experiences at the micro level and established systems to provide compensation.

When residents of Sunder Nagri set out to map heat indices within their neighborhood, they discovered that some streets, including the street where Raja sells vegetables, reflected ground temperatures of more than 54°C (129°F). Residents try to find pragmatic solutions, such as shade, water features or more vegetation.

This summer, satellite analysis found surprising differences in Delhi. For example, an analysis by the news magazine India Today found an average land surface temperature of nearly 44°C in the southwestern district of Mahipalpur, near the airport, compared with about 37°C just 2 miles (3 kilometers) away in the leafy, upscale suburb of Vasant Kunj.

Unni believes community diaries and heat maps can help formulate urban resilience policy, but says a big obstacle is that “Indian cities don’t have the administrative capacity or infrastructure to have decentralized action.”

The diaries have now been submitted to India’s National Human Rights Commission, urging it to recognize extreme heat as a human rights issue and recommend measures to protect people.

Farooq says the team also plans to share the testimonies with ministries, policymakers and parliamentarians to push for more targeted measures to protect people from extreme heat.

He says they are also working to turn testimonies into evidence of impacts and injuries that could be used in lawsuits to increase accountability, given the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that protection from the most adverse impacts of the climate crisis is part of the right to life.

On August 4, the Indian government added heat waves to the list of nationally reported disasters, allowing states to access emergency relief funds.

Unni and Farooq say it “would be ideal” if the decision meant the funds could support local action guided by community engagement.

Arshi is also feeling more hopeful after the new guidelines. “Even if the government sees something as small as our rising medical and electricity costs and tries to help with that, to me it would be a victory. At least they would have seen what we are going through,” he says.