Full Text | 'Hotter Than Ever': Night Heat, Humidity and Other Ignored Aspects of Discomfort

In a conversation with The Wire Talks host Sidharth Bhatia, environmental sociologist and Ashoka University professor Amita Baviskar recently explained why India’s heatwaves are becoming more frequent, intense and prolonged. Baviskar noted that while climate change is a major driver of rising temperatures, local factors such as rapid urbanisation, loss of green cover, construction practices, air conditioning, traffic emissions and inadequate urban planning are worsening the impact of extreme heat.

Warning of the long-term consequences of rising temperatures, Baviskar called for climate-sensitive urban planning, improved housing and public infrastructure, greater investment in adaptation measures, and coordinated action by governments, civil society and citizens to address what she describes as a growing public health and social crisis.

Below is the full text of their conversation, transcribed by Ayushi Singh, an editorial intern for The Wire. 

Sidharth Bhatia: Hello and welcome to The Wire Talks. I'm Sidharth Bhatia. India is in the midst of an intense heat wave. Large parts of the country are facing intense heat. And a few days ago, 50 of the world's hottest cities and towns were in India.

Summers are hot every year, but in recent years, they are getting hotter than ever. Ask anyone, they will tell you they don't remember this level of heat. What accounts for this? Are there reasons localised or is there an overarching reason why India has become so hot?

Does climate change come into the picture? Is it the construction? Is it the trees, the green cover? We don't know. And we have a guest today, Professor Amita Baviskar, professor of environmental studies and sociology and anthropology at Ashoka University to clarify things for us. Her research addresses the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India. Currently she is studying the social experience of air pollution and heat in Delhi. A PhD in development sociology from Cornell University. She has written a book, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley and has edited Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes with Raka Ray. Welcome to The Wire Talks, Professor Amita Baviskar.

Amita Baviskar: Thank you Sidharth. It's a pleasure to be here.

Sidharth Bhatia: We read almost every day that India is experiencing a heat wave. The phrase has become so common. But what exactly is a heat wave?

Amita Baviskar: Well, according to the Indian Meteorological Department, you have a heat wave when the temperature for at least four days is over 40° C or 4° more than what is the recorded average for that particular day. So, one day doesn't make a heat wave, but four days do. And as you said, our experience of heat waves in India is increasing and not only do we have more days where temperatures are decidedly above normal but now these heat waves start much earlier. So for instance, usually you'd expect it to get really hot by say the end of May or June in North India. Now it the heat wave starts in March, in end March. So we're just seeing a sort of prolonging of the period when we can expect to experience heat waves. 

Sidharth Bhatia: Say anecdotally when people say there is a heat wave or the newspaper headlines say there is a heat wave they may or may not be referring to the technical and scientific explanation but clearly they are feeling something, is that so? 

Amita Baviskar: They are certainly feeling something but I also think that we are a little too obsessed with the maximum recorded temperature and that's to do with the fact that the official index also focuses on how high the temperature gets in the day but I think our experience of the heat wave also depends on two really vital factors one of them is a minimum temperature and if the minimum temperature which is a nighttime temperature goes to 30° C or above then it becomes really uncomfortable at night and that to my mind also is an important part of why people say they experience a heat wave.

The other part that's also extremely important is humidity. If you have dry heat with winds, your body sweats, the sweat evaporates, you cool down. There's a heat wave but the body has tried and tested ways of dealing with it. But when there's high humidity in the air then sweat doesn't evaporate and when that happens then you really feel hot because the body can't cool down through evaporation.

So, I think a heat wave as something that we experience is not just about how high the temperature goes. It's about how hot it is at night and how humid it is.

Sidharth Bhatia: Humidity…I'm just picking up on that one point. Humidity would be mainly in places where there is water bodies or moisture in the air. Would that apply to dry places?

Amita Baviskar: I think to some extent yes because if places are well watered, if you have a lot of greenery that is irrigated for instance, you will get higher levels of uh humidity. But I think this has to be investigated much more because you could for instance have construction sites where water is being used in order to cure cement and so on.

You might have higher humidity there. These are localised factors. They may well be more global factors at work that are to do with changing patterns of humidity. But I haven't yet come across any research that explains that phenomenon completely.

Sidharth Bhatia: What could be causing such intense heat? Especially we are talking only about India though there are people saying that there there is a lot of heat in even the summers are becoming very strong in places like England in other places but let's concentrate on India what is causing such intense heat is it normal summer or something else is happening is it local factors or something much much bigger. 

Amita Baviskar: Well, climate scientists have a way of disaggregating what can be attributed to global warming and what is due to local factors. And  what is interesting of course is that climate change is experienced differently in different places because global factors always interact with local environments, local weather patterns, local air pollution for that matter. So, climate change is indeed responsible for the fact that the seasons that we'd grown to expect around the year. The fact that we thought there would be winter and in North India, a spring in March or April leading into summer in May, June, the monsoons in July, the monsoons receding and cool weather starting in September, October. That sort of stability of the seasons has now gone away. We can expect untimely rain at any time. We can expect unusually high temperatures as I said earlier even as early as March which should be beautiful. You know spring weather and these changes in rainfall and in heat and in cold affect everything. They affect what plants grow when they flower. They affect the interactions between plants and insects and key biological processes like pollination that therefore affects certain crops which depend on insect pollination and so on. So, we're looking at a whole series of irregularities and unexpected fluctuations becoming the new normal and that new normal happens to coincide with the ways in which we have built our environment.

So there is something called the urban heat island effect which is the combined effect of all the materials that we use our roads our buildings the fact that they trap heat and they release that heat in a way that adds to the solar radiation that we are experiencing as a part of summer. The fact that we have a lot of traffic, a lot of motorised vehicles that are releasing exhaust fumes. The fact that now most of our cooling is also using forms of refrigeration like air conditioning which works by throwing hot air out. So there is increasingly hot air that is locally produced from traffic fumes from air from air conditioning exhaust from the materials that we use that store and capture heat and release it slowly. All of that contributes to the urban heat island effect as does the fact that we don't have enough greenery and as equally important as greenery is ventilation. You know, the fact that you should be able to move a breeze through a particular environment...

Circulation of air is really important to whether you feel the heat or not. So, all of these things come together in order to create the heat wave that we're all living through right now.

Sidharth Bhatia: We we were talking about the urban urban situation, but there is a lot of heat even in shall we say not exactly very rural but say semi-rural semi- urban places where these factors may not be apply applicable it's such large numbers  people may not be using air conditioning people may not be using the trees there may be some greenery etc but even there from what one understands it's getting very very hot so that can only be because of from the effects of climate change.

So that means these things in urban habitats are being exacerbated but even there they are feeling the heat so to say.

Amita Baviskar: Absolutely. Across central India across the north Indian plains temperatures are indeed very very high and they're also undergoing climate change. So you're absolutely right that there is a global phenomenon that is affecting the entire Indian subcontinent. Even places which are in the mountains are no longer as cool as they used to be and that too is partly a consequence of global warming.

But as I said the other phenomenon that interact with global warming are the ways in which we have organised our lives in even in cities, small towns I would say even in villages.

So whether pe whether people have access to water, whether people have access access to electricity, all of these also affect how one deals with heat and how one experiences it.

Sidharth Bhatia: In your lecture, one of the statements you made was which you have been just now talking about but I would like you to expand on couple of thing. You said social, economic and political factors have played a role. I was quite intrigued. You did explain the shall we say the economic factors and social factors. I have a refrigerator at home, I have an air conditioner, traffic is intense, etc. By political do you mean policies? Are policies also somewhere playing a role?

Amita Baviskar: Absolutely.

I actually call it the Indian anthropocene – the point at which the Indian economy in a way generated its own climate change started in the 1990s with economic liberalisation.

What liberalisation did was that it led to a boom in the construction industry. All of which is no doubt very good because you want more workplaces. You want people to have more homes. All of that is an improvement in people's lives. But the direction of the improvement was very much towards the privatisation of amenities as well. So the choice that we made was to give a boost to the automobile industry, own your own two-wheeler, own your own car. This is how you you're comfortable. It's something that is a matter of pride. Consumerism durables.

Consumerism, but especially the fact that consumer durables became much more affordable thanks to changes in financial systems where you could take loans. There was just much better outreach from these companies. All of this meant that there was a revolution in terms of our consumption of particular sorts of things which are as I said earlier directly or indirectly responsible for increasing the heat burden that we generate. So I'd say that political economy is absolutely central to this and one just has to compare it with other countries for instance countries like China which have really managed to regulate their automobile industry. They've made a big move towards renewables, non-polluting sources. Public transport is emphasised there's strong disincentives from owning private vehicles it's a different direction so I would certainly say that what we're living with right now can be actually traced to a particular moment in time where certain policies were put into place and that's what we have to reckon with .

Sidharth Bhatia: But interestingly we look back on that and see the consumer boom it created and made consumer durables desirable. But we have despite evidence, despite the desperate need for it, we have not changed directly. And now in fact we are moving in that direction with even more like in a turbocharged manner as it were to say yes incentives for all of this. So, there is no sense in terms of the political will or policy direction to say wait a minute look at let's look at what it has caused and see what we can do about it. So I feel sometimes and I want your opinion on this. I feel sometimes that climate change or this heat wave which is an urgent crisis in a sense has not given pause to our the those who manage the political economy.

Would you say that's a fair assessment?

Amita Baviskar: I think it's fair. I think what happens is that if you look at what we learn from disasters, environmental crises of different kinds, be they cyclones, be they earthquakes, we have a system in place. There's a national disaster management authority, there are now state level action plans to deal with heat.

We have an infrastructure in place that's meant to help us, but what that system is good at doing is responding to crisis. So, it's good at disaster relief.

It's not good at putting in systematic and systemic changes that need to happen to prevent those crisis.

So anytime there's a heat wave you will have people distributing cold water, the government issues advisories saying stay indoors which of course is impossible for people who have to work for a living and be out in the heat, delivery agents, construction workers, domestic workers, street vendors, all of those people. But there are some things in place. There are now cooling stations being put up where people who are out in the sun can rest and get some some brief relief. But none of this actually dismantles all the larger structures that keep places hot. None of it helps people have water in their homes so that they can have a bath at least once a day if not twice. 

Basic kinds of concerns. Do you live in a one-room tenement somewhere? Do you have air circulation so that there's some breath of air or not? Or is the room like this suffocating oven? And when night temperatures rise, are we able to create what I call a thermal commons where we can say, 'Here are these large spaces, we will cool them and we will allow people to sleep there.' You can repurpose a number of existing structures to do this. Be they metro stations, be they school buildings, there are lots of possibilities there. But we don't really think about the longer term changes we need to make in terms of building technologies in terms of changing what we prioritise on our roads in terms of street layouts infrastructure the relative space for parking versus for shady place where people can walk, etc. I think all of it goes back to that question of economic liberalisation as a set of policies that brought in this idea of having a world class economy, a world-class infrastructure.

But that was a blindly imitative idea because world class means that we should be like say Singapore. We should have tall air conditioned buildings, people wearing suits and ties and closed shoes because that's supposed to be the professional look around the world in temperate places. And in that quest to world class, we didn't say what does it mean to be to be acclimatised and to work with what one's elements are rather than treat them as a hostile environment and insulate ourselves from them in that very energy intensive polluted way that we do.

A way that ends up making life a lot worse for everybody else who doesn't have access to those air conditioned spaces, those fancy buildings and and apartments.

Sidharth Bhatia: No, I'll give you the you I mean while you were speaking I was kind of just thinking that what you are talking about would appear to be so common-sensical to somebody who sitting there and saying this is India this is the temperature we are a hot country where you temp our summers are getting hotter. Let's kind of rethink how we can imagine. Zoning laws do not allow buildings with glass and steel glass that it doesn't allow the weather to get in and you have more investment to air condition the place. I was just thinking also about Mumbai, where I live. There is this almost overzealous drive to cut down green spaces. The green spaces that we have are being attacked.

And there was an irony because some government worthy some minister or the other made a speech at some convention saying we are very conscious of the environment and that day or the day before his government was announcing plans to cut down x number of trees.

Building permits are given left, right and centre. Redevelopment has become a rampant monster in this city. There's construction. There's dust rising everywhere.

It's only going to get hotter, isn't it? So, nobody is really thinking in terms of, as you said, intense heat as a crisis. Would you not say that there is no political willingness to invest time and attention to it?

Amita Baviskar: Look, I think there's two things that work at different scales. The first part of it is of course the climate change part and on the ground  in the immediate term or even in the next 10 years 20 years there's very little we can do to change that. That ship has sailed. It's going to get hotter globally and we cannot even if we go to net zero emissions by some magical turn around suddenly we're not going to see that heat extreme heat abate.

The thing that we need to focus on is adaptation. Adaptation at the local level that if you're stuck with this, if this is the trend, what can we do to make sure that we are not as vulnerable to deadly heat as we are right now and as we are likely to be even more in the future. So that's the bit of hard thinking that we need to do.

But there are certainly organisations doing it. For instance, CEPT University in Ahmedabad has been working for a long time on building technologies that are more climate friendly all around. But they're not going to get any encouragement from private developers unless there's a big government push to promote it, to subsidise it, to mandate it. Private developers are going to go with what works best for them, which is the cheapest solution.

And that means steel, concrete, build it fast. Never mind if it is thin walls. Never mind if it's, you know, unbelievable from the climate point of view. Everybody's going to put in air conditioners anyway. That's their thinking. So, if we're thinking about needing to adapt, there are a series of planning measures that we need to put into place which should be starting now and unrolling over time and getting, you know, faster. 

But I think the problem with intense heat is like the same problem that Delhi has had with say air pollution. We only talk about it when it's at its peak. A month from now when it is late June say and say the monsoons the pre monsoons shows have started over northern India we're not going to be talking about heat. It's like it's an issue that's over for this year and if that is a public sentiment then that is what the government also takes its cue from. So we just sort of lurch from crisis to crisis year after year and we're not doing anything to address these really important ways in which we can prevent ourselves from broiling in the heat that is to come.

Sidharth Bhatia: So it has not at all become a issue which a politician will think excites the voter at all.

Amita Baviskar: The photo op is in standing at a cooling station, the chief minister handing out gamchas or bottles of water to poor e-rickshaw pullers.

That's what gets you that moment of political attention. All the measures that one would like the government to take if in the long-term interest of the country of the nation are going to be unpopular measures with powerful constituencies with people who are car owners, private vehicle owners, with the building industry which is extremely powerful in terms of backing electoral politics.

There is, you know, it's a very tangled problem and it's very hard to talk about what it would take to systematically untangle it and to say we'll address this particular thread in this way and this and the other. You would need a series of plans for different sectors for transport for building for power generation for cooling technologies for changing people's people's habits. All of these things would have to be undertaken at different scales. It would be not only the government, it would also have to be the media, civic, civil society, NGOs, everybody would have to come on board and say we need to do this. But we haven't had that kind of consensus.

Even though this is what is a classic binding crisis, a binding crisis is one that affects everybody irrespective of class and caste and region and gender and religion.

We are all affected. Like pollution, we are all affected. So, we should all be acting together. But because our country is so divided and so unequal even when we're all affected, we're still finding private escape routes so that we don't have to deal with the tough problems that need to be tackled.

Sidharth Bhatia: So you did mention 10 20 years from today that ship has sailed as far as climate change is concerned we can't do much to change the situation in the next 10 20 years just give us a kind of a imagery of something that could well happen 10 or 20 years from today with this heat.

I mean, how would I as a citizen be experiencing it? Is it going to get really I mean you're talking 48°C or 50°C that kind of thing.

Amita Baviskar: Yes, very much. And that's not in the future. That 47°C and 48°C happened in north Indian cities year before last. You know we're talking about birds falling down from the sky. We're talking about that kind of heat. We are not good at documenting deaths from heat because often the cause of death is recorded as something else – as heart attack or whatever seems to be the medically approximate thing. But there are people who have done the analysis by looking at the sort of average death rate in a city like Ahmedabad.

And they've seen how much that death rate climbs in correlation with temperature increases. And that particular study showed that when there is a heat wave at least 100 more people die in Ahmedabad every day. So extrapolate from that to other places. We're talking about a serious death toll.

And those people who die are going to be the people who are already a bit vulnerable because they're elderly, because they're frail. People who are malnourished, people but yet who must work physically in the heat.

We're going to see many more deaths of workers on uh building sites or they get a heat stroke, they die from that. This is going to increase. So, we're talking about huge levels of distress, including fatalities, including people dying. But for those who are living and enduring, it's going to be really incredibly hard. It's going to be much harder than it has been. And, I think people are already struggling. I my imagination fails me but I can see that there will be violence around water because water is going to become more scarce.

Imagine the stress on people who are not able to sleep night after night because the nights are so hot. What condition are they to work? What condition will they be to be cheerful and patient and resilient?

People are going to snap. I think we're going to see huge amounts of psychological distress which is related to the physical distress.
This is not something we can really fathom. 

Sidharth Bhatia: This is a frightening scenario and one that by now would have should have come to the notice of all concerned. As you said the problem is that there is no coordinated effort in terms of everyone coming together – the media, the civic society, civil society, the government and the powerful vested interests. It happens during the winter a bit when you see deaths because of the cold wave but even there we don't see any kind of solution. We see reportage on this frightening scenario and  I hope somebody is listening to this. That someone somewhere is saying, "Look, this can't go on. We've got to do something about it." My experience based on what I am seeing in this city is that short-termism is endemic in the politician's mind and in the mind of let's say the builder or whoever who says, 'I've got to think in terms of this year's profits.'

So, in my experience, I'm a little pessimistic on this. Normally when I talk to people I look for some sign of hope but I'm a little pessimistic on this. Unless there is a crisis we don't react. So there has to be either global pressure or something else.

The crisis is defined as something that will happen tomorrow morning or happen yesterday...that kind of crisis short-termism is afoot.

Amita Baviskar: True but I think there are emergency measures. This is an emergency. I think there are emergency measures which could really help people and those need to be undertaken too. It's not enough to just stay out of the sun because it's going to be really hot today. I think we could be doing much more as a society and as a country just even in terms of dealing with the worst few days. I agree with you completely that I think the larger questions of, ‘Do you live in decent housing? Do you have decent work?
Do you have enough to eat in the morning before you go out into the sun and work so that you don't feel dizzy with hunger and dehydration?’ All of those things we also have to fix. But we have to go beyond what is currently the lowest hanging fruit which is that you paint everybody's rooftop white. That does help but it's nowhere near enough.

Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah. Well, if you're not ready to do even the simplest task, anything complex becomes impossible for you or either you're you're unwilling or unable or just unseen.

So, I just hope as I said somebody is listening to this not because this podcast but because there are so many similar people who probably have begun talking about this. I hope somebody listen. So because this is not a question of the heat in 2026 but  much more than this.

So thank you, Amita, for this very detailed explanation analysis of what is happening and what should be done and what could happen which will harm or benefit each citizen of this country. So thank you for joining us.

That was Amita Baviskar professor at Ashoka University talking about the heatwave and she clearly has said that to put it collocally you ain't seeing nothing yet because what we are seeing now is perhaps going to get worse and worse. So I hope you heard the show and you thought about what the point she has made. We'll be back again next week with another guest. Till then from me Sidharth Bhatia, Goodbye.

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