The Aakhya Weekly #199 | The Right to Cool: India's Next Urban Rights Frontier

Jun 05, 2026

In Focus: Heat, Rights and Urban India

For most of modern India’s urban history, access to cooling has been treated as a private matter, a function of income, housing and individual consumption. But as extreme heat becomes a defining feature of urban life, that assumption is beginning to break down. When temperatures routinely surpass safe limits, the ability to access shade, drinking water, ventilation and thermally safe public spaces ceases to be about comfort; instead, it raises questions on health, livelihoods, and equal citizenship.

Today, on World Environment Day 2026, under the theme “Inspired by Nature. For Climate. For Our Future”, India finds itself at an inflexion point where cooling is no longer merely an environmental or infrastructure concern. It is emerging as one of the country’s most important urban governance challenges and increasingly, as a matter of rights.

The City that Warms Unevenly

During the unprecedented heatwave of late April 2026, India accounted for 95 of the world’s 100 hottest cities. India has always had summers. What is new is the duration, the frequency and above all, the spatial inequality in who experiences the heat and who escapes it.

Indian cities have warmed at roughly 0.53°C per decade in nighttime land surface temperature. Nearly 60% of the additional heat experienced in cities comes from the cities themselves. Concrete, asphalt, metal roofs, and glass façades absorb heat during the day and continue radiating it long after sunset. The urban heat island effect is therefore a policy outcome. Heat is not just a climate story; it maps onto class and geography in ways that are increasingly hard to separate from questions of rights and governance.

The numbers make it concrete. Only 24% of Indian households own an air conditioner or air cooler, according to NFHS-5. Ceiling fans remain the primary, and often the only method of cooling for over 90% of urban Indian households. Compare this with AC ownership rates of over 85% in Japan, South Korea and the United States. This is not merely a comfort gap. It is a health gap. The ILO estimates heat exposure results in 22.85 million non-fatal injuries, and nearly 19,000 deaths annually, and a 2026 SAGE journal study found bridging the cooling divide must be central to India’s public health agenda.

The economics of the divide are equally significant. Research tracking nearly 400 informal workers in two Delhi slums in summer 2019 found that every 1°C rise in wet-bulb temperature reduced net daily earnings by 19%.

The Framework that Exists and Where it Falls Short

Here is the most important and least reported fact in India’s heat governance conversation: the legal foundation for a Right to Cool already exists. It was laid in March 2024 by the Supreme Court of India itself.

In M.K. Ranjitsinh and Others v. Union of India (March 21, 2024), a three-judge bench led by then Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud formally recognised a new constitutional right: the right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change, derived from Article 21 and Article 14 of the Indian Constitution. The Court held that since the right to a clean environment and the right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change are effectively two sides of the same coin, there was, by 2024, a need to explicitly articulate this as a distinct fundamental right, given the growing menace.

The judgment is two years old. The policy infrastructure to operationalise it has yet to be implemented, but legal advocates increasingly have the constitutional language to demand that it does. In 2019, India launched the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP), a comprehensive 20-year national framework to address cooling requirements across sectors. Its goals include reducing cooling demand across sectors by 20-25%, promoting passive cooling through building design and efficient ACs, expanding cold chain infrastructure and integrating cooling objectives with the Smart Cities Mission and PMAY.

The ICAP has succeeded in shifting the conversation; cooling is now discussed across ministries as a developmental necessity rather than a consumer product. But the harder task of implementation accountability remains unfinished. The document itself proposed that an existing inter-ministerial committee ‘could’ be tasked with overseeing implementation of ICAP. Yet institutional arrangements for monitoring and reporting remain limited. Seven years on, publicly available information on progress remains sparse, with no regular public reporting mechanism in place.

The Workers Who Fall Through Every Framework

Millions of informal workers in India lack access to cooling mechanisms or workplace protections, and the recent Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSH) Code sidesteps gig workers. Meanwhile, even for covered workers, the future of specific heat-protection standards previously found in some state factory rules remains uncertain under the evolving OSH framework.

A joint survey by the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union and HeatWatch in 2024 found that 51.81% of gig worker participants had experienced heat exhaustion while working, 27% reported dehydration, and 18.07% had experienced sunburn or other skin issues.

A 2025 study across 3,300 women in 15 districts across seven states found that 70% in high heat-vulnerability districts reported fatigue, dizziness and dehydration during peak summer months, with 97% reporting income losses averaging more than Rs 1,500 (between April-June) in sectors like agriculture, construction and informal service work that account for the majority of female employment. Heat is also a gendered crisis. The policy frameworks that govern informal work, wage protection, and occupational safety have not yet specifically addressed this dimension.

EPW’s May 2026 editorial noted that heat deaths remain systematically undercounted in official data, and argued that Heat Action Plans must move from guidelines to enforceable obligations with statutory backing. Alluding to Kerala’s mandatory work break for outdoor workers as a model, it called for a transition from device-centric cooling toward passive cooling of the larger environment.

The Patchwork of Progress

Among the states, Tamil Nadu’s approach to urban cooling is one of the most institutionally comprehensive in India. It declared heatwaves a state-specific disaster, enabling the use of State Disaster Response Fund for preparation and relief, not just emergency response after deaths occur. Its Urban Greening Policy mandates at least 15% green cover in urban areas. Its Green Schools initiative has reduced classroom temperatures by 3-4°C through cool roof coatings applied across government schools.

UNEP’s Cool Coalition has also been active across India’s two most critical cooling gaps: public infrastructure and affordable housing. In Delhi, in partnership with government bodies, it is installing a cool roof at the Kashmere Gate interstate bus terminal, covering nearly 150,000 square feet, reflecting at least 80% of solar heat.

On affordable housing, UNEP is working directly with PMAY to integrate passive cooling features into the 10 million homes the government targets for delivery by 2029. This meaningful action and uneven reach extends across India’s cities, where effective cooling solutions keep getting paved over by development priorities. The science is clear. Research finds that increasing tree canopy cover by 10-30% can lower city-wide temperatures by up to 1.3°C and reduce heat-related deaths by around 30%. Cool roofs have been shown to reduce indoor temperatures in informal dwellings by 1-1.5°C during peak summer days. Permeable surfaces, restored water bodies and shaded corridors collectively cool the neighbourhood, not just the room.

No Indian city has legally protected its urban tree cover or green commons as climate infrastructure in its master plan, though Ahmedabad, Telangana, Bhubaneswar, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Kerala, and Delhi are moving in that direction. These moves remain, however, a patchwork. The national framework: ICAP, ECBC, Smart Cities Mission, exists on paper, but compliance is uneven, enforcement is voluntary in practice and long-term interventions like tree cover, cool roofs and thermally safe public spaces are still treated as optional upgrades rather than minimum standards.

What an Actual Right to Cool Would Require

The Right to Cool is not a single law. It is a cluster of enforceable entitlements that, taken together, would change the thermal reality of the majority of Indians who currently have no protection from heat, not in their homes, their workplaces, or their public spaces.

It means passive cooling standards mandated in all new construction, particularly under PMAY, not as aspiration, but as minimum. It means binding targets in Heat Action Plans for free drinking water and shaded rest within 200 metres of every registered vending zone. It means heat thresholds are reinstated in the OSH Code with earnings protection so that a mandated cooling break avoids imposing a lost day’s wage. It means heatwaves classified as a notified national disaster. Lastly, it means the ICAP approves a mandatory monitoring mechanism, annual reporting and binding timelines, so that India’s own national cooling plan becomes something the state is accountable to, not just credited for.

Inspired by Nature

World Environment Day 2026 asks the world to be inspired by nature for climate, to treat shade, water and thermally safe public space as basic urban infrastructure as clean water and street lighting already are. The policy framework exists. The gap is the institutional bridge between the existing pieces.

India’s Right to Cool will not arrive as a single law. It will accumulate, standard by standard, entitlement by entitlement. The Earth is sending its signal. What India builds in response for informal workers, its street vendors, its delivery riders, its children sitting in unventilated classrooms, is the signal it sends back.

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kaushiki kaushalendra singh

Jun 5Edited

The rising temperatures and the heat stress will disproportionately impact the low-income daily-wage laborers, and it is certainly a gendered issue. The OSH Code identifies heat-induced illnesses as an occupational disease (Serial Number 26, Third Schedule, OSH Code of 2020) , however the government must formulate and execute a comprehensive action plan to mitigate this crisis. very well-researched. nice piece, Mahima.

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