The mercury in Delhi has breached 45 degrees Celsius, a threshold that shifts the city from uncomfortable to unlivable for its most vulnerable. For the capital’s poor, this is not merely a heatwave. It is a cruel triage: sweat through a day without shade or risk losing what little income they have by staying home. The infrastructure of inequality has never been so starkly thermal.
Consider the rickshaw puller. His canopy offers no defence against a sun that now feels like a furnace blast. He must pedal or starve. But at 45C, the body’s cooling mechanisms fail. Heatstroke is not a distant possibility but an immediate probability. The hospitals, already strained, brace for a surge of cases they cannot adequately treat. Ice is scarce, electricity flickers, and the urban heat island effect turns concrete jungles into kilns.
This is not weather. It is a design flaw in our collective user experience of the city. We have built dense, glass-clad towers that amplify heat. We have asphalt that stores it. We have cut down trees that once offered a reprieve. The result is a digital and physical divide: the rich retreat into air-conditioned bubbles (their cars, their offices, their malls) while the poor are left to bake. The smart city rhetoric fails when the most basic cooling is a luxury.
What can be done? In the short term, we need immediate interventions that treat this as a disaster response. Cooling centres in slums, subsidised ice, public water points that actually work. But the long term requires a rethinking of urban fabric. Cool roofs, green corridors, reflective paints. These are not expensive technologies. They are choices. And right now, Delhi is making the wrong ones.
The digital sovereignty angle is intriguing. We track heat patterns with satellites and sensors. We build apps to warn of extreme temperatures. But data without action is just voyeurism. The algorithms can predict who will suffer, but they cannot compel the state to act. This is the Black Mirror moment: we have the tools to see disaster unfolding in real time, yet we remain passive observers.
Meanwhile, the poorest are making a different calculation. They cannot afford to stop. They will drink contaminated water, risk kidney failure, or simply collapse. This is the brutal algorithm of survival: every day is a risk assessment. And when the mercury hits 45C, the odds are against them.
