Delhi's Heat Is Oppressive. For Home-Based Workers It is Worse |
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Today, May 1, is International Labour Day.
New Delhi: Meena* welcomes the heat and yet laments its crippling impact on her work and health at the same time.
In a narrow lane in Harkesh Nagar, Delhi, she spends her days rolling papads by hand, laying them out in the sun to dry and delivering fresh batches each week to a local trader. The sun is essential to her livelihood. But the heat that aids her work has worsened over the years.
When temperatures rise, her one-room home which doubles as a workspace and living area becomes unbearable. By the time the sun reaches its peak, Meena has already shifted her workspace three times: first, from the corner of her ten-by-ten-foot room, where the tin roof traps heat like a sealed vessel, to the narrow platform outside her door, a chabutra barely wide enough for two people, and back inside again, without any respite. Inside, it can get hotter than 45° celsius. “It’s like working in a pressure cooker,” Meena says.
Meena is not alone. Home-based workers are the Delhi’s most invisible labour force. Women who stitch garments for global fashion supply chains, pack bindis and toys, cut thread, embroider and string garlands; all from homes that double as bedrooms, kitchens and factory floors. According to 2022/23 National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data, there are more than five lakh home-based workers in Delhi, a majority of them women. Their labour is woven into the city’s economy, and yet, the city’s infrastructure has never been designed with them in mind.
As India faces longer, hotter summers, what were once seasonal hardships — inadequate housing, unreliable water, erratic electricity, clogged drains — have become permanent crises.
Where Delhi’s heat is the most intense
Delhi’s home-based work (HBW) clusters are concentrated in the city’s northern and eastern edges, the same areas that consistently register as the hottest on surface temperature maps. Dense informal settlements and proximity to small-scale industry intensify the urban........