The mercury in Delhi has breached 45 degrees Celsius, and for the city’s poorest residents, the choice between earning a wage and dying of heatstroke is not a choice at all. As I write this, auto-rickshaw drivers are dousing their heads with tap water before setting off on another shift. Street vendors are huddling under tarpaulins that trap heat rather than block it. Construction workers are still climbing scaffolding with nothing but a cotton cloth for shade. This is not the future I predicted. This is the present we have failed to prevent.
Let me be clear. The technology to combat extreme heat exists. Passive cooling building materials, reflective road surfaces, and smart grid-enabled air conditioning are not science fiction. They are deployed in Singapore, in Dubai, in parts of California. But in Delhi, the digital divide has become a thermal divide. The wealthy retreat into climate-controlled apartments and SUVs. The poor survive on the logic of the marketplace: if you do not work, you do not eat. And so they bake.
I have spent years in Silicon Valley optimising user experiences, reducing friction, and making interfaces intuitive. But what is the user experience of a city where your only interface with the heat is your own sweat? We have designed algorithms for everything from dating to traffic flow, yet we have not designed a system that prioritises human biology over economic productivity. The city’s heat action plan includes early warnings and cooling centres, but these are stopgaps. They do not address the structural inequality that forces a rickshaw puller to choose between a 45-degree afternoon and an empty stomach.
The ethical implications of this moment are staggering. Each degree of warming is a failure of governance, a failure of technology transfer, and a failure of empathy. We have the data. The Indian Meteorological Department provides granular forecasts. We have the tools. Low-cost sensors, mesh networks, and AI-powered dispatch systems could redirect water trucks and open cooling centres dynamically. But we lack the political will to implement a human-centric infrastructure. Instead, we treat heatwaves as acts of God, when they are acts of policy.
Let us talk about digital sovereignty for a moment. Delhi’s poor do not need another app. They need shade, water, and a living wage that allows them to take a break when the body says stop. The same logic that drives us to develop quantum computers should drive us to develop simple, robust solutions: white-painted roofs, affordable mist fans, and trees. Lots of trees. A canopy reduces surface temperature by up to 10 degrees. But tree planting does not scale like a software update, and it does not generate venture capital returns.
I am not a Luddite. I believe in technology’s power to elevate. But I am also a witness to the Black Mirror consequences of innovation without equity. The same tools that optimise supply chains can optimise survival. The same data that targets ads can target relief. The question is not whether we can build a heat-resilient Delhi. The question is whether we care enough to do it.
As the sun sets over a city of 30 million, the temperature will drop but the damage will linger. Heatstroke cases will rise. Productivity will fall. And tomorrow morning, the poor will again face the same calculation. I cannot offer a tidy solution in this dispatch. But I can say this: if we continue to treat extreme heat as a weather event rather than a design failure, we are not technologists. We are bystanders.
