On one day in late April this year, all 50 of the world's hottest cities were in India. Most of us read that headline from a cool room, and that says something about how we frame the problem.
Conversations about heat at work tend to start in the office: The thermostat disputes, the temperamental chiller. Those irritations are real, and they belong to a fortunate minority. The bigger story plays out on factory floors, in warehouses, on construction sites, at loading docks and in commercial kitchens, where nobody gets to adjust the setting.
India's workplaces now face a question of safety long before comfort comes into it. Can a building keep people well when the day touches 45 degrees and the power drops out at noon? Air conditioning will stay part of the answer. It cannot be the whole answer.
We have mature safety procedures for fire, electrical and chemical hazards. Exits are marked, drills are run, inspectors visit. Heat has no such routine, even as its toll rises. Estimates suggest India could lose the equivalent of roughly 34 million full-time jobs to heat stress by 2030, and the cost shows up well before then in slower output, more errors and people struggling through the mid-afternoon shift.
The workers most exposed rarely feature in boardroom conversations about climate. A survey of informal workers in three Indian cities turned up a machine operator who collapsed during a 12-hour shift with no shade or cool water on site, and a garment worker who said nothing in her factory had changed in 10 years to ease the heat. Our industrial growth story is being written in places like these, and a factory floor is a workplace, too.
{{/usCountry}}The workers most exposed rarely feature in boardroom conversations about climate. A survey of informal workers in three Indian cities turned up a machine operator who collapsed during a 12-hour shift with no shade or cool water on site, and a garment worker who said nothing in her factory had changed in 10 years to ease the heat. Our industrial growth story is being written in places like these, and a factory floor is a workplace, too.
{{/usCountry}}Let me be fair to cooling, because it saves lives, and every hospital ward and data centre should have it. The difficulty starts when it becomes the only plan. Room air-conditioners already account for nearly 25% of India's peak electricity demand, and the share keeps climbing. When demand spikes, the grid struggles most in the evening, just as the heat stored in concrete and tin starts to release. Parts of Chennai, a major manufacturing hub, lived with nightly outages this summer. A workplace that depends entirely on mechanical cooling has no answer when the chiller stops.
Warmer nights add another layer. Bodies that cannot cool down overnight begin the next shift already tired, which makes heat a safety issue as much as a comfort issue.
Resilience deserves a place in every design brief, and it starts with the building itself. Orientation, shading, wall and roof construction, window size and cross ventilation decide how much heat enters before a single machine is switched on. A white roof helps, though in a multi-storey building, the roof is a small share of the surface that faces the sun, so walls and glass matter just as much.
Simple measures can go a long way. Reflective coatings and low-cost roofing in low-income homes in Ahmedabad have cooled interiors by as much as seven to eight degrees, with no exotic technology involved. The practical answer is a hybrid, where the building handles the first part of the work, and efficient mechanical cooling handles the rest. A fair test for any owner is this. If the power fails at noon in May, can people keep working safely for a few hours?
Most of the workplaces India will use over the next two decades already exist, so retrofitting deserves more attention than the next showpiece campus. Shading, reflective finishes, better airflow and efficient lighting are inexpensive places to start, and deeper changes to insulation and glazing can follow as budgets allow. India ranked second globally, outside the US, in total LEED-certified space in 2025. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the world’s most widely used green building rating system. The country also saw a rise in LEED Operations and Maintenance (O+M) certifications, outpacing new construction and interior projects. This signals a growing focus among building owners on improving the performance, efficiency and sustainability of existing assets.
Operations matter as much as hardware. A plant manager can change shift timings, as Karnataka did for government offices in peak heat. Work and rest schedules can follow heat and humidity readings through the day. Shaded rest areas, drinking water within easy reach and indoor temperature checks cost little and protect a great deal. Hundreds of Indian cities and districts already run heat action plans. Every large workplace can have its own.
Employers can begin with the basics: a written heat plan for every site, shade and water as standard provisions, and schedules that respect the afternoon. Developers can treat orientation, shading and ventilation as design fundamentals, which cost little when decided early and a great deal when added later. Banks and insurers can reward projects that build in resilience.
Policy has the larger task. Workers' groups have asked the labour ministry to recognise heat stress as an occupational hazard under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, with clear exposure limits tied to heat and humidity. Heatwaves were declared a nationally notified disaster in August, which opens up relief funding. Building codes can require passive design, and retrofit incentives would ease the standoff between the landlord who pays and the tenant who benefits.
Close to 90% of India's workers are informal and have no employer to ask for a cooler workplace. That leaves a great deal of responsibility with those of us who build, own and run our formal workplaces. India will keep getting hotter, and the places where people spend their working lives can still be designed to cope.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by P GopalaKrishnan, managing director, Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa, Green Business Certification Inc.