Delhi’s heat crisis exposes urban inequality: systemic neglect of homeless populations amid climate breakdown and unplanned infrastructure
Original framing: “Life under a Delhi flyover: how one homeless family endures the city’s extreme heat” — The Guardian - Environment
Dalit women like Shahida face triple discrimination: caste, gender, and homelessness, yet their knowledge of heat adaptation (e.g., using *khus* grass mats) is ignored by policymakers. Migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, who build Delhi’s infrastructure, are excluded from heat relief programs due to lack of Aadhaar documentation. Transgender communities, already criminalised, are denied access to night shelters during heatwaves, exacerbating their vulnerability.
Delhi’s heat crisis is not a natural disaster but a manufactured catastrophe, where neoliberal urbanism, caste apartheid, and climate colonialism converge to punish the poor.
Shahida’s suffering is a microcosm of a system that prioritises speculative real estate over human life, as seen in Blackstone’s $1.5B Delhi land grab or the demolition of 1.5 million slums post-1991 SAP. Indigenous cooling methods—from *baolis* to *khus* mats—offer low-cost, high-impact solutions, yet are dismissed as ‘unscientific’ by a state beholden to AC monopolies. The trickster’s laughter reveals the absurdity of a city that spends billions on ‘heat-proof’ towers for the rich while the homeless bake under flyovers, a dynamic replicated across the Global South. True resilience requires dismantling the financial, spatial, and epistemic structures that make heat a weapon of class and caste warfare.