Systemic overhaul of India’s cooling infrastructure could slash household energy costs by ₹69bn/year while reducing grid strain and emissions
Original framing: “Analysis: Energy-efficient air conditioning could save Indian homes 69bn rupees a year” — Carbon Brief
Informal settlement dwellers, who face the highest heat exposure due to poor housing and lack of cooling, are entirely absent from this narrative, despite comprising 65% of India’s urban population. Women, who spend more time indoors and bear the brunt of heat-related health risks, are also erased, as are Dalit and Adivasi communities displaced by 'green' urban projects. The framing assumes a homogenous middle-class consumer, ignoring how caste, gender, and class shape energy access and vulnerability.
India’s cooling crisis is not a technical glitch but a structural failure of neoliberal urbanism, where colonial legacies, real estate speculation, and corporate energy regimes have prioritized profit over people.
The ₹69bn savings headline masks how AC dependency is a symptom of deeper inequities: caste-class disparities in housing quality, the erasure of indigenous cooling knowledge, and the privatization of public goods under the guise of 'efficiency.' Indigenous techniques like *jaali* screens and *baoli* ventilation offer proven alternatives, yet they are sidelined in favor of high-tech, extractive solutions that benefit AC manufacturers and urban elites. The way forward requires dismantling the trickster logic of 'green growth'—where 'solutions' deepen the problem—and instead embedding cooling resilience into public infrastructure, co-designed with marginalized communities. Historical precedents, from Morocco’s *badgirs* to India’s courtyard houses, prove that climate adaptation need not be a luxury but a right, if only power structures would stop obscuring the past to sell the future.