Cooling infrastructure: Every summer, India responds to heat in familiar ways. Citizens are told to stay indoors, drink water and avoid outdoor exposure during peak hours. The advice is sound. It also reveals a policy assumption: protection from heat is largely an individual responsibility.
That assumption has outlived its usefulness.
Heat is no longer an episodic inconvenience. It is becoming a constraint on work, health, education and urban life. The issue is not only that temperatures are rising. It is that heat increasingly determines who can work, who can learn, who can move safely, and who can participate in economic life.
India’s climate debate is still framed mainly through mitigation: emissions reduction, renewable energy and green growth. These remain necessary. But adaptation, especially adaptation to rising heat, needs comparable policy attention.
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Cooling infrastructure and heat adaptation
Cooling occupies an odd place in this debate. It is indispensable, but almost invisible.
Unlike electricity, transport or housing, cooling is rarely treated as infrastructure. It is seen as private consumption. Households buy fans, coolers or air conditioners according to income. In this model, resilience is determined by purchasing power.
Thermal comfort is no longer just a matter of convenience.
A public approach to cooling should not mean universal air conditioning. That would be environmentally unsound and socially exclusionary. Cooling must be understood more broadly: climate-responsive planning, passive building design, shaded public spaces, green cover, reliable electricity and accessible public facilities.
This matters because heat is not experienced equally.
A salaried worker in an air-conditioned office faces summer differently from a construction worker, delivery rider, sanitation worker or street vendor. Informal workers cannot always shift working hours without losing income. Women bear added burdens through unpaid care work in poorly ventilated homes. Children and older persons are more vulnerable.
Heat, therefore, is not only a climate issue. It is also an inequality issue.
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Heat inequality and labour productivity
The costs go beyond discomfort.
Heat reduces working hours and labour productivity, especially in physical and outdoor work. It raises health expenditure, affects learning, and increases pressure on electricity systems. Cities see higher power demand precisely when infrastructure is under stress.
These losses are poorly captured in conventional economic measures. Lost productivity from thermal stress, reduced work capacity, higher household spending on cooling, and hidden health costs remain dispersed and undercounted.
This is where economics and environmental governance meet.
For decades, development policy has focused on expanding opportunity through education, infrastructure and markets. Rising heat adds a harsher condition. The ability to benefit from opportunity increasingly depends on the environment in which people live and work. Economic participation itself becomes climate-sensitive.
India’s response must move beyond emergency management.
Heat Action Plans and urban governance
Heat Action Plans in several cities are a useful beginning. They have improved preparedness, public messaging and coordination. But preparedness cannot become the organising principle of adaptation.
India needs to move from heat response to heat governance.
India is not starting from zero. The India Cooling Action Plan, launched in 2019, already recognises sustainable cooling as a national policy objective. Heat Action Plans have also spread across cities and districts. Yet the gap lies in execution. Cooling policy remains weakly linked to building codes, labour regulation, local government finance, public health surveillance and urban design. A country in which a majority of districts face serious heat risk cannot treat these instruments as advisory documents.
International experience offers direction, not templates. Singapore has brought thermal comfort into planning through shade, greenery and climate-sensitive construction. Spain has used public cooling spaces during heat events. The United Arab Emirates treats extreme heat as a workplace risk and restricts outdoor work during peak summer periods.
The lesson is not imitation. It is institutional imagination.
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Public cooling and climate resilience
A meaningful cooling strategy for India should rest on four shifts.
First, thermal comfort must become a planning objective. Urban design, transport corridors and housing policy should account for heat exposure.
Second, passive cooling needs renewed attention. Indian architecture had long used ventilation, orientation and materials to reduce heat before mechanical cooling became dominant.
Third, labour policy should treat heat exposure as an occupational risk. Flexible scheduling, hydration access and workplace adaptation are economic necessities.
Fourth, public investment should prioritise shared cooling infrastructure. Schools, hospitals, transit spaces and community facilities should become anchors of local climate resilience.
The larger question is whether cooling will remain a private commodity for those who can afford protection, or become a public policy commitment that expands human capability.
Environmental policy is often presented as a duty to future generations. It must also protect present lives.
A climate-resilient India will not be built only through cleaner energy and lower emissions. It will need cities, workplaces and institutions designed to keep people safe, productive and able to function in a warming world.
Dr Chitra Saruparia is Director, Centre for Economics, Law and Public Policy at National Law University, Jodhpur.