India’s nights have stopped cooling. Did we design this?

This week, 19 of the world’s 20 hottest cities are in India. The IMD has confirmed above-normal heat from April to June. The Health Ministry has ordered every state to set up dedicated heatstroke management units. The NHRC has written to 21 states asking them to protect outdoor workers and the urban poor. What is new this year is not the heat. It is that the nights are no longer cooling down. A 24-hour heatwave breaks the basic assumption every Indian building News Source: Down to Earth was designed around: that you sweat through the day and recover at night. But here is the deeper problem. Most of what we have been building for thirty years is not an Indian building at all. Sealed glass facades. Wall-towall carpets. Centralised AC. Tiny windows that do not open. We copied the office tower from Dallas and the apartment block from Singapore and pretended the climate would adjust. It did not. We have to.