Author: Sohagni Roy, University of Hyderabad
Editorial Summary
This essay examines heat in India as a structural force shaping cognitive performance, educational outcomes, labour productivity, and creative capacity. Drawing on research in thermal cognition, schooling, labour economics, urban ecology, and climate studies, it argues that extreme heat does more than create physical discomfort: it reduces the margin within which learning, experimentation, and economic risk-taking can occur. Particular attention is given to unequal access to cooling, declining urban tree cover, and the resulting thermal inequalities experienced across classrooms, workplaces, and creative environments. The essay also acknowledges important limitations in the available evidence, including the unpublished status of some findings and differences between research settings and Indian conditions. It concludes by treating cooling, heat-sensitive educational policies, and urban environmental planning as matters of equality rather than comfort.
Introduction
I write this from a room without air conditioning, in the hottest April on meteorological record, having spent recent weeks sending referee requests that all end, for want of a better sign-off, with ”Warmly.” The irony is structural rather than incidental. There is the warmth I dispatch- calculated, aspirational, a form of epistolary optimism- and the warmth I inhabit, the atmospheric kind, produced by a city losing tree cover as fast as it gains concrete, which no sign-off can alleviate. We have grown fluent in heat as metaphor and largely silent about heat as condition, nowhere more so than in the word ”hot” itself, now applied approvingly to everything from physical desirability to a deodorant that claims to have personally defeated thermodynamics. I came to this usage late, from a country where being hot was a forecast rather than an aspiration. Teaching Sonnet 18 under two exhausted ceiling fans in Baisakh, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? lands less as tribute than as complaint: in Bengal, a summer’s day is not the best the natural world has to offer. It is what happens to you.
I think of this too in the old Kolkata cabin restaurants, where the adda- that unhurried, argumentatively digressive Bengali institution of conversation over tea- visibly contracts in April. Sentences shorten. Positions go undefended. The willingness to follow a half-formed idea into uncertain territory narrows in direct proportion to the mercury, and what survives is the consensus opinion: the thing that does not ask the listener to hold a complex structure in mind for longer than the heat permits. This is the argument in miniature. Heat operates on two registers at once. As metaphor, it is celebrated and marketable; as atmosphere, it is treated as backdrop rather than as a force that actively shapes what a mind can produce. This essay is concerned with the second register- heat as physical fact with measurable cognitive, creative, and economic consequences, for a country currently hosting the overwhelming majority of the world’s hottest cities within a single summer, and responding with two inadequate ceiling fans and a labour advisory that recommends ice packs.
The Weight of Baisakh
Let me begin somewhere specific: rural Bengal in the second week of Baisakh, which the calendar calls April and the body calls a sustained emergency. Bengal’s heat lacks the dry, declarative honesty of Rajasthan’s; it is relational, intimate, wrapping itself around you like a well-meaning relative slowly destroying you. At 85–90 per cent humidity, sweat forfeits its one mercy, evaporation. By two in the afternoon the unpaved lane has the colour of something pulled from a kiln, the tin roof ticks and pops as it expands, and the pukur at the village edge, pleasant enough in November, has become a warm, algae-furred mirror smelling of itself and the past. Even the ghughu- the small brown dove whose call Tagore and several generations of Bengali poets could not stop invoking- goes silent by noon. The grandmother on the verandah looks northwest and says nothing, which means everything. The wind drops into an eerie stillness, then reverses, and the Kalbaisakhi arrives with theatrical commitment: thunder as structural event, rain as a sustained renegotiation with the concept of dry. For forty-five minutes it is spectacular. Then it is over, and Bengal delivers its most important meteorological lesson: the storm does not cool the region, it deceives it. Humidity that was 85 per cent is now 92, because everything dry is now wet and steaming. Nothing has been solved. The relief was a loan, repaid with interest, and it is still too hot to think. That sentence, too hot to think, appears in no policy document, curriculum review, or parliamentary debate- a remarkable omission, since it may be the single most accurate explanation we have for a range of failures routinely attributed instead to character, culture, or the market’s inexplicable genius.
This account of heat as a structural rather than incidental condition draws on, and departs from, two adjacent bodies of thought. Amitav Ghosh has argued that climate change is, before it is anything else, a crisis of the imagination: a failure of literary and political culture to conceive of consequences at the scale the crisis actually occupies (Ghosh, 2016). That vocabulary is useful here, because it names what happens when a society’s narrative and institutional forms are simply not built to hold what is happening to it- a diagnosis this essay applies not to fiction or policy but to the Indian classroom and writers’ room. Amita Baviskar’s work on the unequal ecology of Indian cities gives that failure a spatial and political address, tracing how urban environmental goods such as green cover, water, and shade are allocated along lines of class in cities like Delhi (Baviskar, 2020). The thermal hierarchy this essay describes is built directly on that architecture. Where it departs from both is in its object: not climate as backdrop, nor the city as contested commons, but the mind itself as the site where that inequality is finally registered and enacted.
The Confiscation of Attention
Begin with the skull, because that is where it begins. Heat does not merely make people feel worse; it degrades the physical substrate on which cognition depends. Cede˜no Laurent et al. (2018), tracking students through a 2016 heatwave in non-air-conditioned dormitories, found reaction times roughly 13 per cent slower on attention and working-memory tasks than in their air-conditioned peers, as a function of thermal exposure alone. An earlier synthesis of office studies found cognitive performance peaking around 21–22°C and declining meaningfully past 23–24°C (Sepp¨anen, Fisk and Lei, 2006). Indian summers routinely deliver daytime highs of 40–45°C. The gap between what the brain needs to think well and what an Indian summer provides is not a few degrees of inconvenience; it is a chasm, and every calorie the body redirects toward not overheating is a calorie unavailable for the slower, harder work of thought.
From Attention to Learning
What makes this consequential for education specifically is that the capacities heat degrades most reliably- working memory, sustained attention, executive function- are exactly what serious learning requires. A working paper spanning nearly 135,000 Indian schools across seven states, matching satellite weather data to exam results, reports that a rise of just 1.8°C during exam month lowers passing probability by roughly 28 per cent and distinction probability by 43 per cent, with effects concentrated above 40°C (Agarwal et al., 2024). This is a striking figure, and it should be read as one: the study is, at the time of writing, an unpublished working paper that has not yet completed peer review, and its school-level effects have not been independently replicated at this scale. If the finding holds up, it explains something rarely said plainly about Indian pedagogy- that the dominance of rote memorisation is not, at root, a philosophical commitment but a thermal adaptation. It is difficult to run a seminar in a 39°C room; it is possible to reduce the transaction to text, expected answer, and reproduction, and the system then evaluates its own success using examinations that reward exactly the rote performance it left no alternative but to produce.
From Learning to Labour
That ceiling extends into the economy, where the numbers shift from suppressed potential to outright loss. The Lancet Countdown’s 2024 country profile for India estimates that heat exposure cost the country 181 billion potential labour hours in 2023 alone, roughly half again the 1990s average, with agriculture bearing the heaviest share (Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, 2024). The World Bank estimates that up to 75 per cent of India’s workforce, some 380 million people, depends on heat-exposed labour (World Bank, 2022). Peer-reviewed research on Delhi’s informal workers finds earnings falling by roughly 40 per cent during heatwave months (Das and Somanathan, 2024). These figures describe more than a productivity deficit. They describe the destruction of the economic precondition for risk-taking- the slack, the margin between a household and catastrophe, without which experimentation is a luxury rather than a value. A worker who loses 40 per cent of a month’s income does not upskill or absorb a creative failure and try again. She survives.
The Innovation Deficit and the Limits of Jugaad
Layer onto this India’s research spending, at roughly 0.6–0.7 per cent of GDP against China’s 2.4, South Korea’s 4.9, and Israel’s 5, and the standard explanations- colonial inheritance, capital scarcity, private-sector short-termism- are accurate and incomplete, because they do not account for what heat does to the human capital that investment is meant to activate. This is, in significant part, where jugaad comes from, and saying so is not a dismissal of frugal innovation, which is real and sometimes ingenious, but a recontextualisation of it. When attention is scarce and the planning horizon shrinks, the mind gravitates toward the proximate patch rather than the systemic redesign- a rational adaptation to an environment that has made depth expensive and speed necessary. The trouble begins when that adaptation is mistaken for a model, and a constraint is celebrated as an indigenous genius for innovation, a framing that is flattering, widely repeated, and useful precisely because it forecloses the harder question of why the conditions for deeper work were never built.
Hot Sets, Safe Scripts
The creative industries make the same argument visible without needing data to translate it. Research tracking knowledge workers across office buildings in several countries finds divergent creative thinking peaking in a band around 22–26°C (Dedesko et al., 2025). A literally hot writers’ room and a literally hot film set make sustained attention, the safety to risk a shot that might not work, and the confidence to remain in productive uncertainty all harder to sustain. The remake, the clone-of-a-clone startup: the formula is the shape ideas take once the conditions for genuinely new ones have been thermally compromised. Blaming the director or the founder without naming the room is a category error with a long and convenient history in Indian cultural criticism.
Air Conditioning as Cognitive Infrastructure
Embedded in all this is a structural fact about inequality rarely named with the precision it deserves. Air conditioning, at the temperatures now defining the Indian summer, is not a comfort technology; it is a cognitive one, determining whether the brain operates near capacity or under thermally induced impairment. Its distribution maps with uncomfortable precision onto the distribution of educational advantage and access to protected intellectual environments- the cooled exam hall, the climate-controlled office- whose output the system then evaluates as natural talent. What we call meritocracy is, in measurable part, a thermal hierarchy we have declined to name, because naming it would mean admitting that outcomes attributed to intelligence, effort, and ambition are also outcomes of access to cooling. Even the academic calendar concedes as much without saying so: Indian universities name their terms Monsoon and Spring, never Summer, folding the hottest months into vacation and “exam season” as though nothing official is meant to happen to anybody’s mind in them- a decision rational in practice and unaccompanied, in policy, by the cooled libraries and hostels that would make the alternative possible.
The Architecture of Heat
That hierarchy is architectural, not accidental: the accumulated consequence of decades of urban planning choices. India lost roughly 2.3 million hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2023 (Global Forest Watch, 2024). Urban trees are thermal infrastructure- they lower surface temperatures, reduce the urban heat island, and create the shaded microenvironments in which outdoor workers, schoolchildren, and vendors can function closer to their cognitive capacity. Replacing that cover with concrete and glass optimised for density over liveability was not a neutral choice; it favoured those who could afford to manufacture artificial climates indoors, and disadvantaged everyone who must move through the city on foot. The urban heat island is not simply bad atmospheric luck. It is a political phenomenon whose consequences, as ever, fall heaviest on those already bearing the most.
None of the studies cited here settle the question of causation on their own, and the essay is better for saying so plainly. The strongest experimental evidence for heat’s effect on attention, Cede˜no Laurent et al. (2018), was gathered among college students in un-air-conditioned dormitories in Boston, not in India; its physiological findings likely travel, but its context does not, and the extrapolation to an Indian classroom is an inference rather than a demonstrated fact. The Agarwal et al. (2024) results on exam performance, as noted above, rest on a single working paper still awaiting peer review, and its school-level effects have not yet been independently replicated. The relationship between exam-season temperature and pass rates could also run, at least in part, through channels this essay has treated as secondary: disrupted sleep in intermittently electrified homes, reduced nutrition during heatwave-driven crop stress, or absenteeism unrelated to cognition as such. None of these alternative pathways would overturn the essay’s central claim, since they too route through infrastructure and income rather than innate ability, but they complicate any simple attention-to-outcome story. A more cautious version of this argument treats heat as one mechanism among several rather than the master key to Indian underperformance that an earlier draft of this essay was tempted to make it. Trace the chain in miniature and it becomes legible. A boy in a Class XI classroom in Midnapore, mid-May, sits in a 39°C room, his attention measurably compromised before the lesson begins. Multiplied across nearly 135,000 schools, a rise of less than a degree during exam season erodes pass rates and, more sharply, the distinctions that shape a family’s next generation. Multiplied into the workforce, it becomes 181 billion lost labour hours a year: the mason who stops at noon, the flyover crew sheltering under a tarpaulin, not slacking but surviving. Multiplied into wages, it becomes the Delhi informal worker losing 40 per cent of a month’s income- not a rounding error but the exact width of the buffer between a household that can afford a small risk and one that cannot afford any. And from the absence of risk comes everything this essay opened with: the safe script, the cloned startup, research spending stuck below one per cent of GDP, the shade that used to be thermal infrastructure and is now parking, and a labour ministry advisory that answers a civilisational narrowing of imagination with ice packs. Heat attacks attention; attention collapses into learning loss; learning loss compounds into labour loss; labour loss becomes wage loss; wage loss removes the margin within which risk is possible; and when risk becomes unaffordable, the formula is what survives. The formula is not a failure of ambition. It is what ambition looks like once the conditions under which it could afford to experiment have been removed.
If this essay has an argument beyond diagnosis, it is a modest one: that thermal access deserves the same scrutiny we already give syllabus hours, teacher–student ratios, or broadband access. Three changes would cost less than the ice packs currently on offer and would do more. Cooling in government schools and examination halls could be phased in on the same priority schedule as electrification, rather than treated as a discretionary comfort line. Research funders could be gin asking, as a matter of course, what temperature the labour behind a dataset was performed in- a question this essay is embarrassed not to have asked of its own writing until its second draft. And exam boards could build heat-indexed accommodation, extended time, rescheduled slots, into the assessment calendar itself, rather than leaving 43 per cent of a generation’s distinctions to the accident of which April a student was born into. None of this repairs the tree cover, the research budget, or the informal economy’s underlying precarity. But it would be a start at naming, in policy, what the calendar and the cabin restaurant have known for a long time.
Somewhere in Bengal right now, in a term the calendar declined to name after its own season, a student is sitting an exam in a room several degrees warmer than the one this sentence was written in, losing a distinction the heat has already decided she cannot have. She will not know that. The system will not name it. And the formula, as ever, will survive.
”If intelligence routinely changes with temperature, what exactly have we been calling merit all along?”
Can one then extend the argument a little further? Might what we continue to celebrate as individual brilliance be, in no insignificant measure, the privilege of thermal protection? And if cooling has already become a condition for thinking itself, should air conditioning still be classified as comfort—or has it quietly become one of the unseen infrastructures of equality?
Footnote
[1] Roy is a graduate candidate from the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad. Roy can be contacted at sohagniroy315@gmail.com
Bibliography
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