Delhi’s meteorological and political climates seem to be in perfect sync this year. After the infernal heat and dust, the city is holding its breath. It’s like being transfixed by the cobra’s eyes. Everything is at a standstill. A pregnant pause. While the new parliament is in session, nothing significant has been achieved yet, either by the ruling party or the opposition. 

No, Rahul Gandhi becoming the Leader of the Opposition does not count as a significant event. This was along the predicted lines. Similarly, a drop in the mercury is not worth any mention. After twelve months of dealing with “the twelve hottest months in the history of the planet”, a promise of rain feels nothing more than trolling. 

Delhi Lives On

Delhi is not even complaining anymore. There is a new emergency heatstroke unit now at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital where patients are being given ice baths to save their lives. Delhi has recorded at least 14 heatwave days, the highest in at least 14 years. There’s something deeply satisfying about such numerically synchronised stats, no matter what horrors they imply. Two hundred and seventy-five people have been recorded as fatal victims of the heatwave since mid-May in Delhi. The actual numbers are certainly much higher. Delhi is cranking up the air-conditioning. 

Also Read | 20 Dead In Delhi Heatwave, Centre Orders Hospitals To Prioritise Treatment

Even the chief minister’s continued incarceration is not making people’s – his voters and supporters’ – blood boil (the Aam Aadmi Party office at Rouse Avenue has more police around it than supporters). Delhi has a habit of slinking into complacency when ‘terrible’ becomes just a notch better and gets categorised as ‘bad’. Yes, it’s a hot day, but it’s not as bad as yesterday. Our collective memory of heat and dust is rather short. Or, it is too long. Going back centuries and millennia. 

“A Desert Like That Of Karbala”

“The city has become a desert, and now that the wells are gone and water is something rare and precious, it will be a desert like that of Karbala.” Battling a severe water crisis in summer, Delhi is thus described by one of the best-known Urdu poets of all time. Only, the year is 1859 and the poet is Mirza Ghalib. Such is the curse and charisma of Delhi, the more it changes, the more it stays the same. 

Also Read | Heatwave: Death Toll Climbs To 143 Across India

Delhi’s water crisis has worsened over the years. And so has its air. Unfortunately, nobody pays attention to these issues until there is a perfect time for it. In other words, whenever a convenient scapegoat is found. Air pollution, therefore, will only be talked about in the winter, just in time for Diwali and the harvest of rice. The moment the Haryana and Punjab farmers start to clear out their farms, Delhi complains of being choked. Facts and Air Quality Index (AQI) monitors be damned that throw up horrifying numbers all year long. The AQI reading for today, a pleasant day, is 300. Very pleasant indeed! Water is scarce today but in no time the city will be inundated, thanks to a swelling Yamuna and clogged or absent drains. 

Dysfunctional But Functioning

None of this is new. Delhi goes on. It has taken it upon itself to show Mumbai its place. What do you mean by the spirit of Mumbai? Even Delhi is willing to stay charred or flooded for days and still be ‘functional’. At least as functional as wealthy club-goers insisting on getting behind the wheel after a gallon of alcohol in their bodies.

What Delhi does not do is value accountability. And here is the catch. Once you start seeking accountability, you have to be accountable, too. Power outages, for example, can not be only owing to the faulty gear of the power companies or soaring demand etc. Surely, electricity theft and wastage at individual and institutional levels have a role to play in it. Similarly, air pollution may have something to do with the countless cars on the roads. It’s a big stereotype in the West that Delhi folk – the privileged lot that can afford foreign travel – are extremely poor walkers. Yes, despite boasting of one of the best public transport infrastructures in the country, Delhi relies on its private motor vehicle ownership. 

The Many Delhis

Delhi is second to none when it comes to flouting norms and laws in its quest to build and build some more. The city is perpetually under construction. According to a recent survey done by Ahmedabad’s Indian Institute of Public Health, more than 60% of construction workers suffer from heat stress during summer. Despite the Labour Ministry’s 2023 directives to construction companies for a change in working hours and humane work conditions, nothing has changed on the ground, thanks to the absence of strict enforcement. As long as the privileged in Delhi get their draft of cool air from their car ACs, they don’t care who drops dead next to their boiling vehicle. 

Delhi builds, Delhi sizzles, Delhi dies. Often, it’s not the same Delhi. 

(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author

Muslim pilgrims use umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun during the annual haj, in Mina, near the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on June 18, 2024. Muslim pilgrims were wrapping up the Haj pilgrimage in the deadly summer heat on Tuesday
| Photo Credit: AP

Diplomats on Tuesday said at least 550 pilgrims died during the haj, underscoring the gruelling nature of the pilgrimage which again unfolded in scorching temperatures this year.

At least 323 of those who died were Egyptians, most of them succumbing to heat-related illnesses, two Arab diplomats coordinating their countries’ responses told AFP.

“All of them (the Egyptians) died because of heat” except for one who sustained fatal injuries during a minor crowd crush, one of the diplomats said, adding the total figure came from the hospital morgue in the Al-Muaisem neighbourhood of Mecca.

At least 60 Jordanians also died, the diplomats said, up from an official tally of 41 given earlier on Tuesday by Amman. The new deaths bring the total reported so far by multiple countries to 577, according to an AFP tally. The diplomats said the total at the morgue in Al-Muaisem, one of the biggest in Mecca, was 550.

The haj is one of the five pillars of Islam and all Muslims with the means must complete it at least once.

The pilgrimage is increasingly affected by climate change, according to a Saudi study published last month that said temperatures in the area where rituals are performed were rising 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.72 degrees Fahrenheit) each decade.

Temperatures hit 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 Fahrenheit) at the Grand Mosque in Mecca on Monday, the Saudi national meteorology centre said.

Heat stress

Earlier on Tuesday, Egypt’s foreign ministry said Cairo was collaborating with Saudi authorities on search operations for Egyptians who had gone missing during the haj.

While a ministry statement said “a certain number of deaths” had occurred, it did not specify whether Egyptians were among them.

Saudi authorities have reported treating more than 2,000 pilgrims suffering from heat stress but have not updated that figure since Sunday and have not provided information on fatalities.

At least 240 pilgrims were reported dead by various countries last year, most of them Indonesians.

AFP journalists in Mina, outside Mecca, on Monday saw pilgrims pouring bottles of water over their heads as volunteers handed out cold drinks and fast-melting chocolate ice cream to help them keep cool.

Saudi officials had advised pilgrims to use umbrellas, drink plenty of water and avoid exposure to the sun during the hottest hours of the day.

But many of the haj rituals, including the prayers on Mount Arafat which took place on Saturday, involve being outdoors for hours in the daytime.

Some pilgrims described seeing motionless bodies on the roadside and ambulance services that appeared overwhelmed at times.

Around 1.8 million pilgrims took part in the haj this year, 1.6 million of them from abroad, according to Saudi authorities.

Unregistered pilgrims

Each year tens of thousands of pilgrims attempt to perform the haj through irregular channels as they cannot afford the often costly procedures for official haj visas.

This places these off-the-books pilgrims at risk as they cannot access air-conditioned facilities provided by Saudi authorities along the haj route.

One of the diplomats who spoke to AFP on Tuesday said that the Egyptian death toll was “absolutely” boosted by a large number of unregistered Egyptian pilgrims.

“Irregular pilgrims caused great chaos in the Egyptian pilgrims’ camps, causing the collapse of services,” said an Egyptian official supervising the country’s haj mission.

“The pilgrims went without food, water, or air conditioning for a long time.”

They died “from the heat because most people had no place” to take shelter.

Earlier this month, Saudi officials said they had cleared hundreds of thousands of unregistered pilgrims from Mecca ahead of the haj.

Other countries to report deaths during the haj this year include Indonesia, Iran and Senegal.

Most countries have not specified how many deaths were heat-related.

Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdul Rahman Al-Jalajel said on Tuesday that health plans for the haj had “been successfully carried out”, preventing major outbreaks of disease and other public health threats, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

Health officials “provided virtual consultations to over 5,800 pilgrims, primarily for heat-related illnesses, enabling prompt intervention and mitigating the potential for a surge in cases,” SPA said.

Recently, for two consecutive days, Delhi reported daytime temperature above 50 degree C, the highest ever recorded in the city. There is a reason why cities are experiencing higher temperatures than non-urban and rural areas. The ongoing climate change and rapid urbanisation are now defining the Anthropocene, with the cities experiencing both thereby making the urban population vulnerable to the compounding impact. India’s urban landscape (especially population) is projected to double by 2050, adding more than 450 million residents. This rise outnumbers the present total population of the United States and the European Union, signaling a huge historical shift. Given the breakneck urbanisation, our cities must be prepared for future challenges.

The altered thermodynamic, aerodynamic properties of the cities tend to trap more heat, making cities warmer than their rural and suburban counterparts, a phenomenon well-known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. In addition, climate change is causing a significant increase in record-breaking temperatures and frequent prolonged heat waves. Therefore, the overall warming in any city tends to be complex with both urbanisation and global warming playing a pivotal role. This significantly alters the resultant micro-climate of the cities with influence on heat, rainfall distribution and even air pollution dispersion with implication to public health. As a result, the pace and course of urbanisation must be carefully planned using strong scientific information.

In a study published recently, we seek to separate the warming caused by local scale urbanisation and regional scale climate change in the context of 141 major cities in India and quantify their relative contributions. This kind of segregation is scientifically quite complex. One strategy is to determine the contributions of various factors to warming over time. These factors include information on concrete structures, roads, industries, parks, water bodies, residential activities, air conditioning, vehicular activities, and so on. Such detailed analysis requires enormous time, effort and investment, even for just one city and has to be incorporated into models or combined with extremely high-resolution satellite images for further analysis. A much simpler approach was followed using high-resolution night-time land surface temperature from MODIS, a sensor aboard Aqua satellite in NASA’s A-train constellation. Under the assumption that the observed changes in warming (2003 to 2020) over the rural areas are driven primarily by regional climate change, the warming over the urban built-up areas for each city was compared to its rural counterpart at every one sq. km area. Thus, after the removal of regional warming signatures from the urban areas, the signal related to urbanisation was estimated for 141 major and minor cities providing first-time information on global warming-free urbanisation signatures.   

Overall, the rate of warming in cities is nearly twice that of the rest of the country, with local-scale urbanisation alone causing additional warming of about 60%. While all cities showed an increase in night-time land surface temperature, with an average increase of 0.53 degree C per decade, a large divide among cities was seen. The tier-II cities in the eastern part of the country have stronger urbanisation-driven warming, surprisingly not seen even for the larger metros and mega cities. This may be indicating a window of opportunity as smaller highly urbanising cities could be managed well by proper urban planning than large megacities that have limited land and other resources that could be altered at this point in time.

Mitigation efforts

India is aggressively acting to reduce emissions and shift to non-fossil fuel based energy sources as clearly stated in the updated nationally determined contribution (NDC) working towards climate justice. State level heat action plans and implementation of early warning and forecasting systems for heatwaves show India’s commitment towards saving lives by reducing heat related mortality. Considering escalated risks for cities with a large heat exposure, tailored city specific action plans are needed for sustainable urban growth.

Based on the predominant contribution to warming (urbanisation or climate change), the study emphasises that urban heat management must follow a differential approach for each city. Information on the dominant contributor will help urban planners and policymakers to better allocate limited resources. Cities with a large urbanisation contribution may benefit from local scale interventions —use of sustainable materials like cool roofs and cool/permeable pavements, green infrastructures, creation of maintenance of lakes and parks, urban forests, and comprehensive emission reduction strategies. While other cities may require more regional scale efforts —  national or regional level emission reduction, large-scale afforestation/plantation, rejuvenation of surrounding water bodies — for effective warming mitigation with both having implications for extreme urban rainfall, floods, air pollution etc.

(V. Vinoj is Associate Professor, School of Earth, Ocean and Climate Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar, and S.S. Sethi is PhD scholar in the School of Earth, Ocean and Climate Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar)