MUMBAI: When domestic help Swati Yeshi’s air cooler broke down this summer, she immediately headed to the nearest appliance store to buy a new one, on easy installments as the cooler cost almost twice as much as her monthly income.

“The heat messes with my health, worsens my acidity, and my head starts spinning,” said Yeshi, 48, standing in her 10×12 feet tenement in a north Mumbai slum, where she lives with her college-going daughter and husband. Her new air cooler is placed by the kitchen platform, a table fan on the floor, and the ceiling and exhaust fan both spin nonstop.

 “You can’t live without a cooler. We needed it badly,” said Yeshi.

Yeshi earns 6,000 rupees a month and her husband, who works as a road roller driver, makes 12,000 rupees. The cooler cost them 10,000 rupees, which they took on a monthly installment of 1,500 rupees. 

An estimated 500,000 people live in the Damu Nagar slum pocket in Mumbai’s Kandivali suburb. Many of them are low-income households who have, over the years, been shelling out more and more money to cool down their homes as the temperature in the coastal city soars.

Almost 37% of Mumbai’s population lives in slums with asbestos or tin sheets serving as roofs and trapping heat, turning the tenements into ovens. The heat affects the health and productivity of residents, while also increasing their expenses on cooling.

Staying cool is unaffordable for most, “but the heat in my home is unbearable,” said Yeshi.

FROM DROUGHT TO DISTRESS

Most of the residents of Damu Nagar migrated to Mumbai from the Vidarbha and Marathwada regions to escape drought in the 1990s, said Sharda Arondekar, a field project coordinator with the NGO Aakar Mumbai, which works with the area’s waste collectors and homeless. They built their own houses here in Damu Nagar, on the outskirts of the National Park, and settled down.

“They took up ragpicking as a means of livelihood. Today, many from the next generation, who are better educated and better skilled, have moved on to office jobs, but their housing issues continue,” she said. 

Many of these structures are single rooms with a kitchen and a tiny washroom in the corner. Some have two floors, with different families living above and below, and though heat may vary on the two levels, it spares no one.

“Those living on the upper decks experience excessive heat due to direct sunlight being absorbed by the roof and those living on the lower decks don’t have proper ventilation due to small or no windows,” said housing rights activist Bilal Khan of the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan (GBGB), adding that the cramped spaces and badly designed structures were turning these rooms into heat traps. 

Campaigners said Damu Nagar’s residents’ expenses on cooling have been increasing over recent years. And it’s not just in the summer months.

Mumbai recorded its hottest ever January this year, with the temperature breaching 33 degrees Celsius, and the India Meteorological Department (IMD) issued heatwave warnings in March and April. The city recorded its maximum temperature in a decade last April, when the mercury touched 39.6 degrees Celsius.

Rising heat has created an urban heat island effect. Urban heat islands are areas within cities that are hotter than their surroundings due to factors like reduced vegetation, heat-trapping construction materials, and increased energy demands, among others. This is felt most acutely in the city’s informal settlements.

Rapid concretisation is adding to the heat. Mumbai’s built-up area has gone up from 38.4% in 2003 to 52.1% in 2023, and its green cover has decreased from 35.8 % in 2003 to 30.2 % in 2023, according to a study by New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).

The city’s residents, living in its multiple slum pockets, are among the worst hit. The city’s climate action plan notes that “poor communities living in poorly ventilated, dense housing types, with compromised access to essential services like affordable cooling options, remained most sensitive” to urban heat risk. And yet it remains silent on solutions for these communities.

Yeshi’s neighbours’ houses are approximately 10×10 feet and are built of bricks, cement and asbestos sheets.

Shrimanta Patil, mother of three, is among them. Patil has been struggling to buy an exhaust fan. Her 7×15 feet home on the ground level has one window with a mesh. It hardly lets in much light or air, and the walls trap heat inside in the afternoons, forcing her to step outside the tenement for some relief – the most affordable solution for several women like Patil.

Local appliance stores are the silent record keepers of these cooling expenses of low-income families.

“The heat wave has a direct impact on my business – any spike in temperatures immediately registers a rise in sales at my shop with people rushing to buy coolers for their homes,” said Mukesh Jain of Mahavir Stores, an appliance store located in Damu Nagar. 

“Since most of the houses have tin roofs, the heat gets unbearable. Those who cannot afford (the coolers) get the cheapest table fan in the ₹800-1,500 range. A new 15-litre cooler costs ₹2,000-3,000, while a tower fan costs ₹1,200-1,800,” he said.

Those who can’t afford either of these move houses, in search of one with better ventilation.

Asha (name changed), a homemaker, said her toddler was struggling in the heat, which led to her finding a new rental home that costs her 3,000 rupees more, but is worth the expense, she said. 

“My previous house didn’t have any windows and our clothes would get wet (with sweat) even if the fan was on,” she said. Her three-year-old son would get cranky because of heat stress and slept badly at night, which eventually forced Asha to buy an air cooler two years ago. But when that didn’t help either, she left. She now lives in a house in the same neighbourhood, but this one has two windows and good ventilation. 

‘THE ONLY SOLUTION’

The economic disparity between families in Damu Nagar is quite stark – air-conditioned homes share walls with those without exhaust fans. 

“Households that can’t afford to buy new ACs opt for rental ACs. Those that can’t even afford this sleep outside their homes or wait till dawn, when it’s slightly cooler, to sleep. Some just wait for it (the summer) to pass,” said Shweta Damle, director of Habitat and Livelihood Welfare Association (HALWA), an organisation working on improving people’s access to basic amenities. 

Aakar Mumbai’s Arondekar added, “I have seen poor families who make do with one table fan or sometimes, not even that.” 

In the summer, Shanti Bayya, 59, would finish her cooking early, so she could sit outside her home for some relief from the heat. Her daughter Ratna Yalla, who lives next door, said her mother would get seizures.

“The hotter it gets, the stronger the medications prescribed for her,” she said. That’s when Yalla’s brother decided to get an air conditioner for his mother, the installation of which cost him 39,000 rupees, apart from expenses incurred on internal renovations like increasing the height of his mother’s home and putting up a false ceiling to make the place cooler. 

“But a cool house has meant better health for my mother,” said Yalla, who lives without an air conditioner herself, fearing hefty electricity bills. In fact, her husband’s place of work had offered him an AC at a lower cost, but the family turned it down. Their monthly power bill had already gone up to 1,200 rupees from 700 rupees during the summer. Besides, Yalla didn’t want her daughters to get used to living with the AC because she had seen “kids struggling without AC once they got used to it,” she said. So, the family prefers to run the exhaust fan till 3 am. “After all, heat is just a question of adjusting for a couple of months in a year,” she added. 

ACs are still perceived as the “only solution” to deal with the heat, said campaigner Khan. “People sometimes go in for cheaper solutions or install air conditioners (even if they are) beyond their means. Government interventions or even the intent to relieve people from heat stress are completely missing,” Khan told The Migration Story. 

While coping mechanisms, like putting a layer of thermocol or aluminium foil below roofs, are known to reduce indoor temperatures, they are either costly or not practical in many of Mumbai’s slums, said HALWA’s Damle.

“Heat impacts their lives in various ways. Beyond high power bills, it affects their health and livelihoods as it lowers productivity,” she said.

MISSING IN CLIMATE ACTION PLAN

The Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP), prepared in 2022, clearly highlighted the relationship between green cover, house building materials and temperature. It said: “In higher density informal settlements with very low vegetation cover, temperatures were observed to be 6-8 degrees warmer than in the neighbouring residential areas. This can be understood as a function of the high-density morphology of built form, choice of roofing material, which is majority metal or asbestos, and very low vegetation cover.” 

The MCAP also stated that low-income households in informal settlements are at a higher risk of indoor heat exposure because of the poor light and ventilation inside their homes. Recently, a report by Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), public policy think tank, found that over 76% of India’s population faced high to very high heat risk in the summer of 2025. 

Deputy Municipal Commissioner (Environment) Rajesh Tamhane said that a series of measures were being planned in Mumbai for heat relief. But none of them relate to slum dwellers specifically. 

“The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is planning to put up shades at traffic junctions, has made free oral rehydration sachets available at public dispensaries for those with heat stress and offers immediate air-conditioning relief for those with heat stroke.” While the city has prepared a draft of its Heat Action Plan, it has not been made public or circulated to solicit suggestions.

While the MCAP is being implemented and one-third of the municipal corporation’s budget is devoted to climate action, activists like Damle said that very little action has been taken on the ground. “The government is ignoring the current plight of the marginalised, refusing to intervene and pushing them towards redevelopment as the only solution to fight climate stress. Such an approach is erroneous and insensitive, considering that redevelopment is a long-drawn process with generations of people waiting for new homes. Besides, redeveloped houses too have turned out to be vertical slums lacking proper ventilation,” she said. 

For now, Yeshi is at peace with her new cooler. It offers her rare moments of respite after a long day of work. She said she cannot take a day off, but sometimes she’s left with no choice. “The other day the heat got too much for me. I simply couldn’t handle it anymore and I stayed put at home. The next day, I had to hear a mouthful from my employers,” she said. 

But Yeshi cannot afford to lose any of her jobs, not with her multiple cooling devices running for most of the day.

Edited by Subuhi Jiwani

Hepzi Anthony is a Mumbai-based independent journalist

This story is produced as part of The Heat Shift series that will explore the unequal impact of heat on some of the world’s most marginalised