This is the second of a two-part series on how extreme heat governance in India discounts informal workers’ experiences.
The Anatomy of Administrative Heat Relief
THE ADMINISTRATION delivers where it can record delivery. Relief reaches the places that are easy to count, supervise and photograph, and does not reach workers who move through the day. India released its first Heat Action Plan thirteen years ago, national guidelines have been revised twice since 2016, and more than a hundred cities have adopted some version of the template.
Across those same years the informal workforce the plans exist to protect has grown faster than the plans covering it. This is an experienced bureaucracy that has spent over a decade refining the same instruments against a heat load rising in step with the urban expansion the state calls progress. Thirteen years of practice have not widened the State's picture of who is vulnerable, and what this audit finds is not a bureaucracy lagging behind a moving target but one whose picture has never moved.
The Delhi Heat Action Plan 2026 delivers mainly relief through three mechanisms. They are fixed cooling centres, the distribution of objects at those centres, and the rescheduling of outdoor work. Each assumes that a worker can stop, travel to a listed location, wait there, receive what is being handed out, and return. Almost no one the Action Plan claims to protect can do this.
Women’s safety at cooling centres
Domestic and home-based workers are the clearest case. Their worksite is the private household, and every provision in the Action Plan is placed in public space, so they sit outside its spatial imagination altogether. The record shows the same absence. On June 6, 2026 we filed an application with the Revenue Department and District Disaster Management Authority, REVEN/R/2026/61640, asking six questions about women's safety at cooling centres. We asked for the standard operating procedures, whether female staff were posted, whether any women-only sections existed, whether closed-circuit cameras were installed, how many complaints had been received, and what coordination there was with the police and the Delhi Commission for Women.
