Gulshan wraps herself in a wet dupatta and tries to sleep.
It is sizzling in the roughly 25-square foot room where she lives with her husband and four children. A tiny fan circulates hot air in the still room on the topmost floor of a ramshackle narrow building in Sunder Nagari in north-east Delhi. There’s a small open terrace where Gulshan cooks — on firewood since gas cylinders are both unavailable and unaffordable. She asks me to touch a steel utensil. It feels as hot as if she has just taken it off a flame.
Like many women in the locality, Gulshan, whose husband drives a rented auto-rickshaw, takes on poorly-paid piecemeal work. Every extra bit counts. But her work — sewing pockets on cosmetic pouches for ₹5 per pouch, each with six pockets — has dried up. She had bought a sewing machine when there was work in the winter months. Now, monthly instalments to pay off the machine are accumulating.
With schools shut, the children are at home and Gulshan would rather have them indoors than run around in the lanes below. She believes she can get a job since she has studied up to the 10th grade but her husband won’t give her permission saying she will get ‘spoilt’.
Stuck at home in the claustrophobic heat, everything stresses her, she breaks down in tears: “I feel so anxious all the time.”
Urban heat has emerged as an unequal climate challenge with women, particularly those on the margins, bearing the heaviest load. In places like Sunder Nagari there is no escape from the open drains buzzing with flies that run alongside tiny, densely-packed dwellings with no ventilation, windows or green spaces. At night, fear of petty crime means doors remain shut to both thieves and the stray breeze. And with temperatures hovering at 45 degrees Celsius at the end of May, night temperatures too remain around 39 — not enough for human bodies to cool down.
Global warming, we say. But warming at roughly 0.5 degrees Celsius per decade doesn’t tell you the whole story or account for the heat stress in our cities.
Close to 76% of Delhi is persistently heat stressed and this includes newer showcase constructions such as Bharat Mandapam, states a report, Making Delhi Heat-Resilient by the Centre for Science and Environment. Green cover has fallen to 14.14% in 2024 from 25.36% in 2014; trees being planted in the name of beautification include palms that have almost no shade. And an IIT Delhi study finds 67% of Delhi streets lack adequate shade. Building material includes tin roofs commonly used in slum clusters. Even bus shelters use metal roofs that turn them into literal ovens.
The crisis isn’t heat. It’s design that has exacerbated heat.
Unlike its other seasonal affliction, pollution, Delhi’s heat doesn’t get as much media or public attention. To document what citizens undergo, Greenpeace this year launched a garmi khaata or heat diary, asking a group of around 50 women to document their experience. “It’s to collect evidence based on the lived experiences of households and an attempt to get the perspective of women into policy,” says Avinash Chanchal, deputy programme director, Greenpeace South Asia that is piloting the project.
Maybe it will tell the story of 17-year-old Arshi who dreams of becoming a civil servant. But with nine people sleeping in the tiny room she calls home, it’s tough to find the space, or inclination, to study even at night when the others are asleep. “It’s too hot to even light a candle,” she says.
Namita Bhandare writes on gender. The views expressed are personal
