India's heatwave season has quietly stretched at both ends. What used to be a relatively pleasant February and March now carries heat alerts. October and even November holds on to summer far longer than it used to. In 2025, the country recorded its first-ever February heatwave, something with no historical precedent. Together, the summers of last three years suggest that India is crossing a climate threshold in real time. The meteorological data shows that heatwaves have become more frequent and longer lasting since the 1960s. Every summer is now described as "unprecedented". And this is not just an India phenomenon as Europe, Australia and other regions are also experiencing ‘unprecedented’ summers. This indicates that the cause is global impact of climate change and not just local.

 

Part of what is driving this is the city itself. Rapid urbanisation has replaced road verges, tree zones, and water bodies with concrete and asphalt - surfaces with relatively low albedo that absorb solar radiation through the day and continue to release heat through the night, while earlier trees, water bodies, and grassy land would cool the environment through evapotranspiration and shading. Urban expansion alone accounts for approximately 60% of the warming trend in Indian cities, with city centres running 3°C to 4°C hotter than surrounding areas. The result is that the night, which should offer the body time to recover from the day, no longer reliably does so.

 

This is the urban heat island effect, and it carries a feedback loop. As cities heat up, demand for air conditioning rises. As more units run simultaneously, they expel waste heat outdoors, raising ambient temperatures further, driving more demand forcing a vicious cycle. India's peak power demand hit an all-time high of around 270 gigawatts in May 2026, largely driven by cooling demand. 

 

The urgency is evident. The India Cooling Action Plan forecasts an almost eightfold increase in aggregate cooling demand by 2037-38 compared to the 2017-18 baseline. NITI Aayog projects that air-conditioner penetration could reach around 65% by 2050. Thus, without more thermally efficient buildings and sustainable urban design, the resulting surge in electricity demand will strain the power system, increase energy consumption during peak hours, and might make our climate goals harder to achieve.

 

The consequences extend beyond rising energy demand and electricity bills. For instance, Delhi Fire Services responded to more than 7,800 fire incidents during the first four months of 2026, nearly a fifth more than the previous year. Increasingly, prolonged heat is also contributing to fires originating in air-conditioning units, creating serious risks to both life and property.

 

Across rural and peri-urban India, a quieter transformation is underway. Villages are steadily acquiring urban characteristics through “rurbanisation,” bringing concrete roads, pucca construction, and urban settlement patterns to communities that once had their own, often more effective, answers to heat. 

 

Traditional homes understood the climate they were built in. Thick mud walls kept interiors far cooler through peak afternoon hours than concrete ever could. High roofs and ventilation gaps allowed hot air to escape and make the living spaces comfortable. Courtyards created natural airflow cycles. Clay tiles, jaalis, water bodies in and around homes were not aesthetic choices. They were functional cooling systems, refined over generations in response to local conditions. 

 

As villages modernise and aspire upward, these methods are quietly being left behind. Concrete is read as progress and mud as a symbol of backwardness. But whereas concrete rapidly conducts and radiates heat into a building, mitti acts as a buffer – absorbing and delaying the heat transfer through its superior thermal mass. The longer, hotter nights that urban residents in ‘India’ have been experiencing for years may soon become the reality in ‘Bharat’ too, as the same materials and settlement patterns take hold.

 

Nearly 380 million Indians, roughly three-quarters of the workforce under conditions of direct heat exposure. Construction workers, agricultural labourers, delivery riders, and street vendors cannot retreat into a cool room when temperatures become unbearably high. For many, the advice to stay indoors during a heatwave sounds less like protective guidance and more like a luxury reserved for someone else.

 

This is the equity dimension that any conversation about heat must confront. Those bearing the worst of it have contributed the least to the conditions creating it. The pattern seems familiar. Much as developing nations have faced the harshest consequences of a climate crisis they did little to cause, India's poorest are bearing the brunt of an urban heat problem they played little part in creating. Conversations about cooling cannot remain confined to air-conditioned conference rooms while the people most exposed to heat remain on the margins of policy.

 

The urgency cannot be overstated. NITI Aayog projects India’s urban population to increase from around 500 million to over 800 million by 2047, with more than half the country’s population living in cities. The response thus cannot be limited to emergency advisories issued when temperatures spike. Heat must become a central consideration in all our urban planning, housing, labour policy, infrastructure, and energy planning. Greener urban spaces and water bodies should be treated as essential infrastructure rather than beautification, heat recognised as an occupational hazard, and housing designed for the climate they stand in rather than despite it. 

 

Simple design interventions – proper building orientation, reflective roofs such as white roofs, painting room interiors in light colours, external shading, daylight optimisation, and natural ventilation – can substantially reduce cooling demand over a building's lifetime with little additional cost as well as provide more comfort to occupants. Cooling shelters and dedicated delivery rider rest stations should be developed in cities, particularly for gig workers and daily wage earners working in the open and/or their working hours readjusted, to combat intense summer day temperatures. Solar-panel canopies over footpaths in high-footfall areas can simultaneously provide shade for pedestrians and generate clean energy.

 

As cooling emerges as one of India's defining infrastructure challenges, every road laid, every building constructed, and every neighbourhood planned will shape the country's resilience to a warming climate. Climate change may be global, but the heat now gripping cities and villages alike is a reminder that climate change is neither a distant threat nor a passing anomaly. India that is ‘Bharat’ must therefore pursue a twin strategy – building resilience to a hotter future while accelerating the transition to more sustainable ways of living and developing – because the cost of delaying will ultimately be borne by we the people of India.