​Cooling doctrine: On India’s response to extreme heat

Over the past decade, India’s response to extreme heat has settled into a familiar choreography. Summer comes and the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) regurgitates its tally of rising preparedness. The 16th Finance Commission has gone further, recommending that heatwaves be notified as a national disaster — a designation that would unbolt the door to dedicated central funding. But the heat action plan, as currently conceived, has reached the limits of what it can do. Even the NDMA concedes that the quality of these plans is uneven — several are imitations of plans drafted elsewhere. Where implementation happens at all, it leans heavily on short-term palliatives such as water kiosks, public advisories, and shaded waiting areas at bus stops. While these measures save lives at the margins, they do not alter the underlying exposure of the tens of millions of Indians who work, commute and sleep in conditions that are becoming, in the most clinical sense of the word, biologically untenable.

What India needs is something larger and more ambitious — a national cooling doctrine; a scalable framework that treats sustained access to safe indoor temperatures as a public-health entitlement to be guaranteed. The doctrine must begin where the harm is most acute: mandatory minimum cooling standards for indoor workplaces — factories, warehouses, commercial kitchens, call centres, delivery hubs — backed by an honest and fair inspection regime. Technology will have to do the heavy lifting by deploying passive cooling materials, reflective roofing deployed at scale, district cooling systems for dense urban zones, and cheaper, more efficient air conditioning calibrated for the peculiarities of Indian grids. But the problem cannot be solved by importing solutions designed for the temperate, wealthy economies of the global North. India’s heat is wetter, longer and more humid than the dry European summers that produced much of the existing cooling literature. Most Indians cannot afford the energy bills that western-style mechanical cooling implicitly assumes, as the grid in India, even on its best days, can supply at most 60% of its installed capacity. There is no quick fix on offer but to keep printing heat action plans while indoor temperatures climb is no longer a serious answer — it is theatre.