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.
East district replied by dispatch 5801 to 5802, marking every question not applicable. West district replied by dispatch 2201, saying the first question did not pertain to its office and returning ‘nil’ against the rest. Of the 70 workers we interviewed, six were domestic workers. All six worked indoors with only a fan. All four carried drinking water from home. Three held an eShram card and one held nothing at all. None had received any alert, advisory or any equipment, and three of the four had dizziness, headaches and severe exhaustion this summer and rested at home. Sara*, thirty, working out of the jhuggi opposite Model Town metro, was asked what would help. She said cooler housing and a stable income.
How active and accessible are Delhi’s ‘Cooling Centres’?
Laakhan* sells at Majnu ka Tila. His locomotor disability already limits the days he can work, and through the extreme heat he works with no shelter within reach. Under Section 8 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, district disaster management authorities must include persons with disabilities in their safety planning and maintain a register of persons with disabilities in the district so they can be reached with early warnings. Our cooling centres application, REVEN/R/2026/61639, asked for the list of activated centres with their dates, hours, capacity, facilities, footfall and accessibility provisions. East district answered by dispatch 5803 to 5804, attaching 16 sites with hours, capacity and footfall, and nothing against accessibility. West district listed one centre – Hari Nagar Depot 3.
Homeless people are excluded by the hours and by the door. Of the seven cooling centres we audited, three closed before night falls – Delhi Cantt at 6 p.m., GTB Nagar at 7 p.m., Dhaula Kuan at 8 p.m. AIIMS stays open through the night but requires an Aadhaar card from 10 p.m., and the staff explained the rule by reference to the people who come after dark. At GTB Nagar, District Disaster Management Authority staff had tied the chairs together to stop students gathering, and the chairs have armrests, so nobody can lie down on them. The category the Action Plan writes as universal, outdoor workers and vulnerable persons, describes one kind of worker. He is male, able-bodied, housed, and free to leave his post.
The misrecognition starts before the list of beneficiaries. The April 29, 2026 order issued by the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi justifies itself in its opening lines by reciting that Delhi's temperatures frequently exceed 44 to 47 degrees, posing serious health risks to outdoor workers and vulnerable populations.That is the trigger and the object of protection in a single sentence, and the trigger is dry-bulb temperature.
Our own readings show what it misses. At Jama Masjid on May 30, 2026, the air read 31 degrees with humidity at 50 per cent, which put the heat index in the Action Plan's caution band. At Dhaula Kuan Bus Stand on June 8, 2026, at around noon, the air was 37 degrees with humidity at 61 per cent, which put the heat index in extreme danger, the most severe reading recorded across all seven site audits. Neither morning came anywhere near 44 degrees. Humidity is what makes the difference, because a body cannot shed heat by sweating into air that is already saturated, and the shade thermometer does not register it. Six of the 55 workers interviewed in the second round reported fainting or collapsing this summer, either being affected themselves or knowing others who were affected. Suraj*, a vendor at Model Town, had fainted that morning and travelled some distance to get medicine. A threshold set this high assumes the bodies working under it can take more heat than other bodies.
How efficient are the mobile relief units?
Once the order has named who it protects, its answer to their vulnerability is a fixed list of objects. Each district was to procure a thousand ORS pouches a day, 300 cotton gamchas of twenty-four by forty inches, and 200 caps, along with one water cooler, a drinking water tank of four to five hundred litres, a first aid kit, a shade awning and serving counter, a thirty-litre fridge, disposable glasses and a bin for the used ones. That is the whole of what a heat emergency entitles a worker to. Not time, not wages, not the right to stop work.
Our mobile relief units application, REVEN/R/2026/61638, asked for the number of units, their routes, staffing, medical supplies, operational logs and distribution records for May and June, 2026. East district answered by dispatch 5805 to 5806. One unit covered the entire district, operational from May 6, seven to eight hours a day, carrying only ORS sachets and a single first aid kit. Against a daily requirement of300 gamchhas, it distributed 11,895 for the season, which is forty days' worth. Against 200 caps a day, it distributed 8,072 across the entire season, again forty days. Against a thousand ORS pouches a day, it distributed 43,547 across the entire season, forty-four days. The unit had been running for fifty days by the date of the reply.
The same reply reports 1,18,515 beneficiaries. Add the four distribution figures together, 43,547 ORS sachets, 11,895 gamchhas, 8,072 caps and 55,475 glasses of water, and the total is 1,18,989, within 474 of the beneficiary count. The district has not counted people. It has counted objects and called each one a person reached, so a worker who took a cap, a gamcha and a glass of water enters the record three times. The same reply states that no complaint was received.
Of the 70 workers we interviewed, 68 had received no protective equipment from the State at all. Those who manage the heat buy their own water and ORS or carry a gamcha from home.
Where are Delhi’s Cooling Centres located?
Locating the cooling centres was itself part of the audit. No public list exists. The centres are not advertised, they do not appear in any published notice we could find, and we could not find them on Google Maps. We found them by canvassing the areas where they were said to be, asking vendors and drivers stationed nearby, and telephoning one official after another until someone could confirm an address. Two of the seven we eventually reached were three days and one week old. A worker looking for shade in the afternoon has none of these methods available.
The only lists that exist came back through the RTI, weeks after the fieldwork. East attached 16 sites in two tables. West listed one centre for the entire district.
The first seven East sites opened between mid and late May, 2026. They were a gurudwara in Trilok Puri, Shri Ram Chowk in Mandawali, Shuk Vihar in Krishna Nagar, the Shivpuri labour chowk in Geeta Colony, Baboo Ram School near the DCP office in Shahdara, the Shyam Giri temple at Shastri Park, and Shastri Park metro station. The last two carry an annotation on the form, Shobha Yatra, from Shastri Park to the Red Fort, and they are the only two sites on the entire list to receive any consumables at all. The temple received 4,000 ORS packets, 1,500 gamchhas and 1,400 caps; the metro station received 1,000, 500 and 600 respectively. The Shivpuri labour chowk, the one site on the list where workers gather, received 10,000 litres of drinking water and nothing else. Every other column against it reads ‘NIL’.
The second table lists 9 more sites, at metro stations, bus terminals, a court, a Mother Dairy and a cloth market. All opened on May 30, and every one reads ‘NIL’ for ORS, gamchhas and caps. Anand Vihar bus stand is entered as having served between 1 lakh and 4 lakh beneficiaries.
Workers described spending their days elsewhere. Platform workers waited for bookings in parks and outside commercial clusters, daily-wage labourers gathered at labour chowks, and sanitation workers followed fixed routes through neighbourhoods.
We audited the cooling zone opposite Jama Masjid on May 30, sited between gates 3 and 4 of the mosque. There were ten air coolers, 91 chairs, one water cooler and five fans, of which two were running. The zone is staffed by Delhi Civil Defence, one woman in the morning and men in the evening. Sarla*, the Civil Defence inspector on duty, said the caps, gamchas and ORS pouches were meant to be handed out and that the ORS comes by the enforcement officer's vehicle. At half past eleven, none of it had arrived.
The people sitting in the zone were a head constable from Delhi Police and two guards from the police station, drawing the working coolers and fans towards their chairs. Four vendors working a few feet away told us the same thing, "Police wale hi baithte hai waha, gamcha topi toh nahi milta hai." We have just seen the police sit there; we have never seen gamchhas or caps being distributed.
Sarla also told us the supplies were being held back rather than distributed, because the crowd here could not be trusted and might steal at night. As she said it she gestured at the market opposite, "yaha momdan rehte hai, aapko toh pata hi hoga." Mostly Muslims live in this area.
The district's own register shows the consumables going to the two zones on the Shobha Yatra route and to no other site in the East district.
Two of those vendors, Imran* and Ramesh*, we interviewed in full on June 17, when the air was 36 degrees with humidity at 44 per cent, told us that they did not hold any worker-specific government ID. Both said they cannot take a break even in extreme heat, because a break costs them the day's earnings. Both had headaches and severe exhaustion this summer, and Imran did nothing about it and kept working. Both recorded that they know the cooling centre is there and that it is not meant for people like them. Asked what he most needed, Imran said a toilet and cool water.
Ravi*, a waste worker, was sitting immediately outside the same centre and had not gone in, because places like that, he said, were not meant for people like him. He slept on an acquaintance's verandah in Chandni Chowk, and what he asked for was housing. Nisar*, who guarded the Jal Board office in the market, said that every couple of days somebody in the public collapses.
An e-rickshaw driver stationed opposite the zone has been driving for four or five years and works ten to seven. He spent ten to thirty rupees a day refilling a bottle he brought from home. He did not use the cooling centre, because sitting in a cooler made no sense when he has to be back out the moment a savari comes, and he rested under a tree instead. Nobody from the centre had ever spoken to him. When the heat got to him he drank nimbu pani. Other drivers have had heat stroke, though none so far has had to be taken to hospital. May and June are the hard months, he said, and the savaris have thinned out and so has the income.
Can workers realistically stop working in extreme heat?
Three documents set three different windows. The Delhi Heat Action Plan 2026 runs mobile relief units from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. It restricts construction work from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m., or 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on orange and red alert days. The Labour Department's heat advisory suspends outdoor work from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. None of them aligns with another, and none matches the hours a worker says he cannot leave his post. Mansingh*, a vendor at Model town, put it as, "Our work only begins from 11 am, how can we stop working from 11 am to 4 pm?" Most of the workers we interviewed said the same thing about that window.
Manoj*, twenty, working construction at KG Marg, described what happens when he tries. Ten minutes late and the supervisor threatens to bar him from work, "das minute late hue supervisor ne bola kaam nahin karne denge." Of the 70 workers we interviewed, 55 held no worker-specific government ID at all, and most of the rest carried only an eShram card, which registers a person as an unorganised worker and confers no entitlement to heat relief. Manoj described the arrangement in four words, "Sab kuch khud ke paiso se."We have to spend our own money on everything.
We asked the Labour Department what it had done about employers like his. Our application, LABOR/R/2026/60213, filed 6 June, asked how many construction site inspections were carried out, whether there was any heat-specific inspection drive, how many non-compliant sites were found, what action was taken against employers, and how many heat-related illnesses or deaths were reported between April and June, 2026.
The Labour Commissioner forwarded it to the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board and to all thirteen district labour offices. The Board returned it on July 1, saying it did not hold the information. It went on July 3 to the Chief Inspector of Factories, who replied on July 20: No inspections were carried out. There was no heat-specific inspection drive. No non-compliant sites were found. No action was taken against employers. No heat-related illness, injury, or death was reported. Advisories were said to have been issued from time to time, with the records available for inspection on any working day, but no copies were supplied. None of the thirteen district labour offices replied at all.
Gig and delivery workers in extreme heat
The Action Plan recognises gig and delivery workers as a vulnerable occupational group and calls on platform companies to limit shifts, reduce service radii, permit workers to decline work during extreme heat without penalty, and provide access to water, shade and rest. It names no penalty, no monitoring mechanism, and no consequence for a company that does none of it.
Nayla*, twenty-six, does cleaning work dispatched through a platform. Her worksite is wherever the next booking is, and between bookings she waits in a park. When we spoke to her at Bashesar Nath Park on June 27, the air was 39.2 degrees with humidity at 46 per cent, which the Action Plan classes as ‘danger’. Asked what would help most, she said resting hubs for platform workers, so they do not have to wait in hot parks for bookings. There is no water where she works, so she buys it, and she uses a janta toilet on the way. She had heard of no cooling centre, no mobile relief unit, no helpline and no alert, and had received no advisory and no equipment. This summer she has had dizziness, headaches, vomiting, heat rash and severe exhaustion. She has also had skin infections and urinary tract infections. She did nothing about any of it and kept working, because a break in extreme heat costs her the pay or the job.
Samir*, a driver we spoke to opposite the Jama Masjid zone on 30 May has been in Delhi thirty-five years, having migrated from Uttar Pradesh, and has driven autos here for twenty-five years. He joined Uber and Rapido four or five months ago and works from 8 in the morning to 9 at night. Neither the platforms nor the government has approached him with anything. He buys two 500 ml bottles at a time from water machine vendors and spends 50 to a 100 rupees a day on water, nimbu pani, sattu, bel juice and aam panna. He rarely eats through May and June because he does not feel like it. He knew nothing about the cooling zones, and pointed out that their boards are in English.
We asked the districts what facilities existed for gig and informal workers, what guidelines governed their access, and what had been spent on them. East district replied that the information is not available in this office. West district replied that the questions do not pertain to this office, adding that it had issued the necessary directions to the concerned departments. It did not name the departments or supply the directions.
11 applications went out between June 6 and 8. The Revenue Department and District Disaster Management Authority (‘DDMA’) answered none of the five applications that were filled with it. Two districts – East and West – replied substantively. Three sent transfer letters carrying no information. South West forwarded all five to the SDM at Dwarka, a sub-division within South West. Central forwarded all five to two SDMs and to DDMA Central, all at the same building in Jhandewalan, in a letter that was undated, unnumbered and never copied to us. Old Delhi forwarded ours to the Public Information Officer, DDMA, at 14 Darya Ganj, its own address. Eight districts did not respond at all. Every application is now past the thirty-day statutory deadline, which is deemed refusal under Section 7(2) of the Right to Information Act, 2005.
So the only account of where Delhi's cooling centres are, and of what reached them, comes from two districts out of thirteen.
How aware is the public of Delhi’s ‘Cooling Centres’?
Our awareness application, REVEN/R/2026/61653, asked what had been spent on informing the public that the cooling centres existed, for a breakdown by medium across posters, hoardings, newspapers, television, radio and digital, and for copies of any guidelines issued to field officers to ensure that awareness reached homeless people, daily wage labourers, construction workers and gig workers.
East district replied by dispatch 5799 to 5800 that the information is not available in this office, and marked the breakdown and the field guidelines not applicable. West district replied that awareness had been disseminated through social media platforms, and marked the rest not applicable.
We asked the seventy workers whether they were aware of a heat or emergency helplines, naming 1077 (Disaster helpline), 1070 (Relief Commissioner For Natural Calamities) and 112 (Integrated Helpline - Emergency Response Support System (ERSS) Police, Fire & Rescue, Health services etc). 67 were not. 61 had not heard of the mobile relief vans.
The replies contain the operating hours, the capacity, the agency of record, and the assurance that no complaint was received. No complaint was received because the programme created no way to make one.
The Action Plan mandates awareness materials displayed prominently and publicity through print, broadcast, digital and social media. None of it reached the market it was written for, and the spend on it is unaccounted for. The order requires that Civil Defence volunteers cover the exercise daily, that photographs and videography be taken, and that a report reach the Revenue headquarters by 5 p.m. each day.
Administrative heat relief in Delhi is counted, photographed, staffed in uniform and reported to Revenue headquarters by 5 am each evening, legible upward, to the officials tracking it, and illegible outward, to the worker it names. The infrastructure at Jama Masjid was present and the records could be completed, while the vendors a few feet away sat outside it, saying it was not meant for them.
Why thermal dignity is hard to claim
Ask a worker what relief would actually mean, and the answer rarely matches an object on the State's procurement list. Firoz*, a Muslim street vendor in north Delhi, asked what he wanted from a heat relief order, did not name water or shade. His demand was that his basti not be demolished. Ram*, working beside him, wanted the police to stop moving them on, ‘We earn here every day'.
A few steps from Firoz and Ram, Kavita* sells too. She has had dizziness, nausea, heat rash and severe exhaustion this summer, and when we spoke to her she was unwell. It is the first time, she said, that she has understood how much the heat is affecting her. Nobody had asked her before.
At the Dhansa bus stand in south west Delhi, Ramanand* and Iqbal* each named the same thing as their single most important need – recognition for hawkers and protection from eviction. Swaraj* asked whether the government could give relief at all without it turning into another story about workers who do not want to work, "firse hume aalsi bolenge." They will again call us lazy.
Asked what would actually help, 37 of the 55 workers interviewed in the second round wanted more public drinking water points and 28 wanted income support, higher wages or cheaper food. 26 wanted shade near the worksite. 15 wanted a cooler or a fan at home and 13 wanted housing that did not trap the heat, because the night is when a family has to sleep. Only 9 chose cooling centres welcoming to workers, the lowest of every option offered.
The State's picture of what a worker needs was assembled without asking a worker.
The Action Plan builds a right around objects, so it has nothing to say to a man who needs his house to still be there in September. It builds a right around the outdoor worksite, so it has no procedure for consultation, because it never imagined the worker as someone with a view. And it is handed down by a state that has spent decades attaching the suspicion of idleness to labourers who pause, which is why Swaraj offered the discretion to stop work suspects the discretion will be used against him. Each of those is a design decision.
Ask what living with dignity means for a working-class body in a warming city and the answers are all material. Water where the work is. A toilet that is open and clean. Shade at the vending spot. A cooler at home so the family can sleep. Housing that does not become an oven. The security of the place you work from. Wages that hold when the heat takes the customers away. And the ability to stop, without losing the day.
None of that is a heat measure. All of it is what heat makes unavoidable. Climate change raises the price on a deprivation that predates it by generations, and charges that price to the people who cannot leave the street.
This summer the price was paid privately. 68 of the 70 workers we interviewed received nothing from the State's relief effort. They bought their own water and carried gamchas from home. The Chief Inspector of Factories recorded ‘nil’ inspections, ‘nil’ non-compliant sites and ‘nil’ action against employers. The national surveillance system recorded 20 heatstroke deaths for the whole country.
On August 4, 2026, after the summer had ended, the Ministry of Home Affairs told the Lok Sabha that heatwaves now sit in the list of notified natural calamities under the guidelines governing the disaster response funds. Money is available for the next one. Nothing in that change gives a worker a right to stop working, obliges an employer to let him stop work, or creates a channel through which he could complain when he is not allowed to.
The most mundane failure was that the government refused to identify heat waves as a serious problem that further marginalizes working class people. While it has been notified as a disaster, the underlying question that often is unanswered by the state and ignored in public discourse, is whether it is considered disastrous enough for labouring bodies.
Throughout our conversations with workers as well as officials located in and around the cooling centers, there was ambiguity as to what these centers were and how they functioned. While cooling centers plastered big photographs of the Delhi CM and Prime minister along with snowflakes around them, people found it difficult to understand what entering this zone would mean while workers mostly passed by these zones thinking this is simply inaccessible to them. No semblance of relief reached them in the form of fair breaks from work, wages during dangerous temperatures or the widely proclaimed cooling vans in their vicinity. Throughout this audit, we met workers unaware of whatever measures were provided by the government and beyond this audit, we came to see these measures as, at best, a government, blind to working class issues, self-patting itself on the back.
The next heat season begins in March, 2027. The audit continues, and it will not end in a report. We will take the findings back to the workers they came from and hold jan sunwais, reading the RTI replies aloud in Hindi and Urdu beside the people those replies describe, with the officials responsible invited to answer. Whoever does not appear goes into the record too. The demands will be settled at those hearings but the audit indicates the shape of those demands. A trigger set by the heat index rather than by a shade thermometer. A right to stop work that carries the wage with it and binds contractors and platforms. Relief that does not depend on holding a card, when 55 of 70 workers hold none. Cooling to be located at their workplace -indoors and outdoors. A published list of centres, information in the languages that people can read, and a complaint mechanism with a named officer, so that a ‘nil’ return means something. The next heat wave arrives with funds attached to it. Whether anything else has changed by then is what we will keep asking.
Note: * All names have been changed for the purpose of anonymity and safety of the respondents.
