Dear readers,

You must have read that Banda in Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest temperature anywhere in India – a staggering 48 degrees Celsius – and Sirpur in Telangana registered 46.5 degrees Celsius on May 21. Other cities and regions have hit 45 degrees Celsius. The feels-like temperature of heat and humidity combined has hit the higher 50s. The map of India is all deep red and orange. It has been that since April; Akola in Maharashtra recorded a blistering 46.9 degrees Celsius on April 27. From the mountains to the coasts, heat is a national emergency. But the brutal scorching heat does not touch everyone the same way. 

The worst hit are the ones least equipped to deal with it – outdoor workers, gig and construction workers, millions living in cramped and poorly designed tenements, without access to cooling devices or forced to buy water. The nearly 380 recorded cases of heat stroke were of people cities mostly forget about. The national emergency cannot be tackled by offering a glass of water to people like them; governments at every level must step up to provide relief and institutional responses. It begins by recognising what’s below the radar: night heat which shows unprecedented levels, built form which traps heat in tiny homes, cooler regions like Kashmir turning hot, recognising shade (and shade-giving trees) as heat mitigation – all themes in this edition of  Question of Cities.

This summer has seen rising night heat levels across India’s cities. In the lead essay foregrounding night heat, multimedia journalist Ankita Dhar Karmakar takes the thermal camera across Delhi’s Seemapuri, a colony of waste pickers, and posh areas such as Safdarjung Development Area and Hauz Khas. The cramped rooms that pass off as homes in Seemapuri showed extreme heat readings at 9pm making it difficult for residents to sleep and compounding their day’s heat stress. Low-income settlements remain heat-stressed through the night while Safdarjung Development Area and Hauz Khas were 5-6 degrees Celsius cooler that night. Experts advise recognising night heat in plans and policies including in Heat Action Plans, sending night heat alerts, providing night cooling infrastructure, and heat-sensitive urban planning. Read it here.

Architect-writer-illustrator Nikeita Saraf joins the dots between how building design intersects with heat and makes it unbearable by taking us through Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) buildings in Mumbai’s Goregaon East. Here, she found the feels-like temperature, or the Heat Index, approximately 10 degrees higher than outside as the built form – tiny windows, lack of cross ventilation, no open spaces, materials used – simply ignores high temperatures and humidity. The SRA persists with such flawed designs despite better alternatives like Sangharsh Nagar being available, primarily to suit real estate developers, she argues. Read it here.

Street vendors, indispensable to cities but structurally excluded from urban planning and infrastructure decisions, are forced to deal with continuous, unavoidable and hazardous heat, explain Shalini Sinha from WIEGO, and urban practitioner Aravind Unni. Their longitudinal action-research study in Delhi found an overwhelming 96 percent of vendors reporting a significant decline in customer footfall, 90 percent reducing their work hours, over 70 percent reporting material losses, and additional healthcare expenses. They recommend, among other measures, reframing heat as a labour issue, including vendors in city planning, cities investing in basic services infrastructure, and making Heat Action Plans informal worker-centric. Read it here.

As Srinagar and other parts of Kashmir turn hotter than ever in summer and winters become warm, discussions revolve around declaring heat waves in a region known to be bitterly cold to cool, writes Srinagar-based journalist Athar Parvaiz. Heat is no longer an aberration but fast becoming the norm, driving up the demand for air conditioners and the state government moving towards artificial snow-making for Gulmarg. Srinagar’s architecture and infrastructure were not built for heat; tree-cutting for projects has reduced shade. As heat-related health hazards rise, people used to cold temperatures have to be sensitised towards heat stress, and governments must build heat response into policy and practice. Read it here.

Shade, both natural and built, would provide some relief to people who must be outdoors but there’s hardly any discussion in India’s cities about shade as heat mitigation and public infrastructure. Hyderabad-based researcher Malladi Vaishnavi after field research across vending corridors in Mehdipatnam, Charminar, Koti and Secunderabad, writes that like the lack of basic public services such as water, the absence of shade has been normalised too. Cooling centres, shaded work space and rest infrastructure, access to potable water at vending sites can be immediately provided by governments; shaded areas such as bus stops and community halls can become temporary shelters during extreme heat days. Read it here.

In our regular section, News Digest, read about the sharp rise in pollution across the Indo-Gangetic Plains, Himalayas; India looks at solar solutions to reduce roof temperatures; Migration not a failure but part of climate adaptation; and how Paris, London and New York coped with hot summers across the 19th and 20th centuries.

Hope you find this edition engaging and worthwhile. We would love to hear from you at [email protected]. If you haven’t yet subscribed to Question of Cities, do so here and share our work on X, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Smruti
May 29, 2026