The summer of 2024 was a stark reminder to Bangalore’s residents that the city’s once-famous pleasant climate was a thing of the past.
Temperatures soared to unprecedented levels, touching 39°C.
Along with these temperatures, the city grappled with a severe water crisis as groundwater ran dry, and water tankers supplying potable water became unaffordable. The impact was visceral.
“It is very hot now. I feel very tired. I become very thirsty,” their exhaustion compounded by endless power cuts. — Resident, Marappanapalya ward
“There is no water in the borewells this year.” — Local fruit vendor
For me, this city-wide crisis was not just a headline, but a culmination of issues I had been seeing at different scales.
It took walking through the scorched streets of the ward in the north of the city for me to truly understand the nature of heat. For a long time, I saw heat as a monolithic threat, imagining the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect to envelope the entire city. Heat was understood to be only a rising number on the weather reports.
However, through working on-ground in the ward, I started to see heat beyond a single climate event, but as a deeply personal experience for every citizen, one that is filtered through the cracks of the city’s vast inequalities and injustices.
Marappanapalya is a heterogeneous ward, a mix of commercial, industrial, and residential. Newly constructed high-rise apartments loom over the crumbling remains of erstwhile industrial complexes, while the old agricultural produce yard, a bustling microcosm of its own, gives way to dense low-income settlements.
On a map, it is just two square kilometres of area divided into land-use types. But the on-ground reality is home to thousands of lived experiences of heat stress.
Heat is no longer a number here. Not just a temperature on the thermometer, but how it seeps into the built environment. It is felt differently from one street to the next. Moreover, it amplifies existing inequalities. Someone living in a dense informal settlement divided by caste and class lines feels heat very differently from someone living in a high-rise apartment.
Working on understanding heat from a systemic lens within the ward, we saw the variable nature of it. It affects every individual differently, based on where they live, the nature of work they do, the materials that surround them, and their ability to access cooling.
Conventional methods of response, like State and City Heat Action Plans (HAPs), which are top-down, treat the city as a uniform entity. They are formulated using broad meteorological data, with little to no direct consultation or participation from the communities they are meant to protect.
They fail to account for the starkly different realities of citizens on the ground.
We saw this firsthand - a vendor selling vegetables on the street faced increasing heat very differently from a garment worker facing stifling conditions inside the factory. A resident of an air-conditioned high-rise apartment with 24/7 power back-up does not experience 39°C the same way as a pourakarmika sweeping asphalt roads under the sun.
This understanding of heat led our project at ATREE, to question how to understand the interconnectedness nature of how our cities adapt to and mitigate increasing heat stress. How do we make this vulnerability visible? How do we move from generic advisories to targeted and meaningful action? We developed a Heat Vulnerability Matrix to understand who is more at risk within the ward, beyond just exposure to heat.
We had to map the social and economic factors that limit a citizen’s ability to cope. This matrix helped us pinpoint the vulnerable groups of citizens who are the most susceptible - the sanitation workers, auto-rickshaw drivers, and construction workers who spend long hours outdoors during peak temperatures, with little access to cooling, shade, hydration, and rest.
This index was more than a research output. It became a guide, telling us who to talk to and whose stories were being ignored. We heard from a hauler who remembered sleeping under the shade of trees that no longer exist.
“As I have seen over the years, there is a decline in their number,” he said while connecting the dots between disappearing green cover and rising heat.
We spoke to a fruit vendor who told us that in the heat, customers dwindle, her produce wilts, and so does her income. Local fire station officials told us that the calls they receive increase during the summer, as the hot, dry conditions lead to garbage piles easily catching fire. An auto rickshaw driver said that when it is hot, “the number of customers goes down. Nobody likes to go outside in the sun.”
The vulnerability matrix becomes a tool to give vulnerable populations a presence in policy discussions that formulate heat action plans.
Understanding the problem as unequal and variable fundamentally changes the way we think about solutions. A city-wide heat action plan is a start, but effective action happens at the neighbourhood level.
At this level, tailored solutions can be devised based on the nature of the built environment, access to water and energy, and the demographic profile of the community. Heat is a network hazard that pulls on the thread of every urban system - it stresses the power grid, leading to outages that affect those who cannot afford inverters. It strains the water supply and affects the infrastructure of daily life - health, livelihoods, and productivity.
“When it is hot, I am unable to travel or even walk outside for a while. The fan keeps running… so the electricity bill increases.” — Factory worker in the ward
The solution is more than a blanket advisory to stay indoors or stay hydrated. There have to be tangible solutions.
For a street vendor, this would mean the municipal corporation installing low-cost tarpaulin shaded areas and installing public water dispensers. For a factory worker, it is about implementing mandated cooling breaks and improving building ventilation through retrofitting design solutions. It is also more than immediate temporary relief.
Tackling heat stress is about embedding this understanding of vulnerability into our urban planning. It is about a systemic issue that connects our water system, our public infrastructure, our building byelaws, and our labour laws.
My understanding of heat stress has evolved beyond seeing our cities as abstract maps, but as collective lived experiences. Tackling this crisis requires a shift in perspective in our systems of design, governance, and policy - from a top-down approach to a more grounded bottom-up action-based understanding. We must look beyond centralised plans and towards hyperlocal action.
Ujjvala Krishna is a researcher with the Urban Water Programme at WELL Labs.
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