India’s heatwaves no longer arrive as anomalies. They settle in, early, intense, and unrelenting. Each summer breaks records, and yet the public conversation around heat often remains technical: temperatures, warnings, advisories. What is less frequently examined is how heat functions not merely as a climate phenomenon, but as a class issue.Extreme heat does not affect everyone equally.
The Uneven Geography of Heat
For the urban middle and upper classes, heat is inconvenient but manageable. Air conditioners, work-from-home arrangements, insulated housing, and access to healthcare create a buffer between the body and the climate. Heat becomes something to complain about, not something to endure.For daily wage workers, construction labourers, street vendors, sanitation workers, and agricultural labourers, heat is lived directly on the skin. It dictates working hours, health outcomes, and income. Missing a day of work due to heat exhaustion often means missing a meal. Climate change, in this sense, magnifies existing inequalities rather than creating new ones.
Labour Under a Burning Sun
Despite recurring heat advisories, work rarely stops. Infrastructure projects continue, delivery timelines remain unchanged, and informal labour remains unprotected. Heat stress is treated as an individual problem, drink water, take breaks, rather than a structural one.
The absence of enforceable heat-related labour protections exposes a troubling truth: productivity is often valued over survival.
Urban Planning and Thermal Inequality
Cities intensify heat through concrete, asphalt, and disappearing green spaces. Informal settlements, often densely packed and poorly ventilated, trap heat far more than planned neighbourhoods. Access to shade, water, and cooling becomes spatially unequal.
Urban heat islands are not accidental—they are the result of planning decisions that prioritise profit and speed over habitability.
The Language of “Adaptation”
Policy conversations increasingly emphasise adaptation: cooling shelters, heat action plans, behavioural advisories. While necessary, this language subtly shifts responsibility onto individuals and communities. It asks people to adapt to unlivable conditions rather than questioning why those conditions persist.Adaptation without accountability risks becoming a form of resignation.
Heat as a Moral Question
To speak of heat only in meteorological terms is to miss its ethical dimension. Who is expected to work through extreme temperatures? Who is allowed to retreat indoors? Who absorbs the long-term health consequences? These are both climate questions and questions of justice.
Surviving the Summer
India’s heat crisis cannot be addressed solely through forecasts and advisories. It demands a rethinking of labour laws, urban design, public health priorities, and the value placed on human life.
As summers grow harsher, the real test will not be how well cities function, but whose bodies are considered expendable in the process.
