Code red: What it will take to make it through summer

In one small town, electricity has failed.

The wet-bulb temperature, a metric that combines air temperature and humidity to indicate whether humans can cool off via sweating, has crossed a dangerous threshold.

People wade into a lake to survive.

But the lake has heated up, and they perish there.

Of course, it’s science-fiction. Or is it?

And for how long?

***

When the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was asked in 1999 what made his country’s transformation possible, he listed air conditioning as a key factor.

He added that, as a technology, it had changed the nature of civilisation by enabling sustained work in the tropics. One of his first acts as prime minister, in the 1960s (he was PM from 1959 to 1990), was to install air-conditioning in government buildings.

Thermal comfort is not a luxury that low-income citizens in developing countries should have to earn the right to, as and when they become wealthier. It is a prerequisite for the productive, cognitive, human work that makes countries rich.

Singapore understood this, and did not treat cooling as a luxury to be deferred until prosperity arrived. It became prosperous, in part, because it decided that extreme heat, with all its fallouts, was a problem to be solved, rather than a condition to be endured.

We aren’t there yet. And it is costing us.

As things stand, according to the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, India lost an estimated 247 billion potential labour hours to extreme heat exposure in 2024 alone.

That translates to $194 billion in potential income losses from heat-related reductions in labour capacity, much of it in agriculture and construction.

This is how we quantify impact because it makes the damage visible to institutions more fluent in economics than in human suffering. The real question we face is, of course, deeper: How do we, as a country of over 1.4 billion, intend to prepare for a world that will likely soon cross the threshold of 1.5 degrees of warming (over pre-industrial levels)?

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At the moment, we continue to treat cooling as an elite perk.

The air-conditioned office, home, car and railway coach are luxuries for the very few. Only 30% of coaches operated by the Indian Railways, for instance, are air-conditioned. In terms of seats, the gap is even wider: about 78% of all railway berths are non-air-conditioned.

We have seen the launch of the Vande Bharat in 2019, a gleaming, fully air-conditioned rail service, priced accordingly, with sleeper fares per head starting at about ₹1,000. We saw the Amrit Bharat launched in 2024. Modern but explicitly non-AC, its sleeper fares per head start at ₹149.

We do not yet have the third option: trains that are temperature-controlled and affordable.

In a country where heat claims hundreds of lives each year, this pattern is repeated across urban transport, housing, offices, schools, hospitals.

The burden of rising heat falls disproportionately on the lower-income strata. Informal and daily-wage workers without paid leave pay for hot days through lost working hours, which can mean less food, or none at all, on the plate.

It will take some updating of our worldview to see heat not as an inherent condition of life but a manageable variable. And, increasingly, a threat. Countries that plan for this new reality will be best-placed to limit the human toll.

To be sure, India isn’t alone in struggling to make the shift. The dilemma is visible in countries around the world.

An estimated 4 million homes in the UK now have air conditioning, up from about half that three years ago, The Guardian reported last week. Electricity costs remain a worry; as does the strain on the grid and the carbon costs of cooling.

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Meanwhile, the scale of the problem is shifting, in ways that barely need elaboration at this point.

On average, the number of heatwave days in India (added up across monitoring stations) has risen from 413 per year between 1981 and 1990 to roughly 600 per year between 2011 and 2020. These days are also now experienced across a widening geography.

All these figures are set to rise further.

In 2024, the country recorded the highest number of heatwave days since 2010, across a season that stretched from February to September. That year, according to the same Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change report, Indians were exposed to 366 more hours of intense heat, compared to the average during the 1990s.

Some studies indicate that heat levels in parts of the Gangetic plains could, by the turn of the century, surpass levels at which outdoor work becomes unsafe for humans.

A dystopian scenario mirroring that in Robinson’s book could be headed our way.

As that scenario moves out of the realm of fiction, there is a strong economic argument to be made, in the language policymakers understand, for the universal cooling of places that shape long-term human capital: classrooms, exam halls, anganwadis, hospitals, transit hubs, recreation centres.

Research indicates that higher temperatures during the school year significantly reduce performance. A 2025 study examining the impact of temperature on school outcomes published by the department of land economy at University of Cambridge indicates that a 0.64-degree rise in average temperature could reduce pass rates by as much as 3%.

We already know this. A child sweating through a Class 10 board exam in a room built like a hothouse is battling her environment and not giving her best. She will carry the burden of that through formative years; and likely for life.

In large parts of India, in fact, peak summer has traditionally been considered too hazardous for children.

This is why the annual school vacation is timed as it is. Some states reopen schools and still have only half-day sessions, in further acknowledgement of the risk. All of which is another way of saying we are aware of the potential harm, and have organised our calendar around it, rather than addressing it.

We track whether each school has electricity, a toilet, a lab with computers. But we don’t track whether the structure is thermally safe.

What we measure, we manage. What we do not measure, we silently endure.

In a warming world, our usual approach of resigned acceptance is itself a hazard.

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What will it take to change this? Where does one begin trying to cool over 1.4 billion people?

The India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP), first published by the union environment ministry in 2019, lays out a long-term ambition. A healthy future, for the many, will depend on India building a mindset that treats cooling not as an indulgence but as vital infrastructure.

It might also help to reimagine some of the active barriers to cooling.

A useful example is slab pricing, where the cost of electricity per unit rises sharply beyond a certain point. The logic is sound: basic electricity use should remain affordable, and heavier consumption should cost more. But as heat intensifies, as the line between luxury and necessary consumption blurs in certain areas, slab pricing can end up penalising cooling.

A well-insulated, well-designed home with a modern, efficient AC unit, for instance, draws less power than a home with a tin roof and a power-guzzling second-hand air-conditioner. This means the latter household can end up paying more per degree of cooling (assuming it has access at all).

We have not addressed such issues because our imagination remains stuck in a world long gone: of closed markets, imported ACs, airy homes and manageable heat. Today’s dense cement jungles, with their urban heat islands and rising temperatures, bear little resemblance to this outdated vision. The once-arid Indian plains, too, are changing: humidity is rising as searing heat and emerging storm systems carry water vapour farther than before.

A Viksit Bharat would be one where every household has a certain threshold of basic needs met. A phone. A television or computer. Thermal safety.

And there are ways to do it.

The World Bank estimates that a greener cooling pathway for India could generate $1.6 trillion in investment opportunity by 2040, and nearly 3.7 million jobs in areas such as domestic manufacturing, technician training, quality control and green energy infrastructure.

Universal cooling is a sound economic agenda. Can it be a green one too?

Click here for a look at the trade-offs we will need to negotiate on that front.

(Kashyap Kompella is a tech industry analyst and author of three books on AI)