Auditing Delhi’s Heat Action Plan: A Ground Study | Part I

This is the first of a two-part series on how extreme heat governance in India discounts informal workers’ experiences.

THIS ESSAY opens a series on how extreme heat is governed in India and who that governance reaches. It comes out of an independent collaboration between economists, lawyers, journalists, activists and researchers mapping heat from the ground up, tracing how far the State's promised relief travels before it breaks down in practice. The series makes the case that extreme heat should be notified and resourced as a disaster in its own right, and it documents, through sustained fieldwork, what heat means for the informal workers who cannot stop working through it.

This essay presents the first findings from an ongoing audit of the Delhi Heat Action Plan 2026 and of the order issued under it on April 29, 2026, by which the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi directed all thirteen District Magistrates to deploy mobile heat relief units and procure consumables for the summer. Delhi released its first draft Heat Wave Action Plan in 2023, notified it in April 2024, and updated it in 2025. The 2026 plan is the third iteration.The audit covers seven of Delhi's revenue districts through field visits, RTI applications and interviews with workers at markets, labour chowks, construction sites and transport hubs. 

Between May and July 2026 we audited seven cooling centres and interviewed seventy informal workers at seventeen sites across those seven districts. Fifteen of the interviews were open-ended and fifty-five were conducted on a structured instrument, so the ranked preferences reported later are drawn from the fifty-five. 

The sites were chosen because they are where the policy is supposed to function. These included markets and commercial clusters, metro and bus stands, jhuggi clusters, construction sites, and the waiting points where workers stand between jobs. In parallel, the collaboration filed eleven applications under the Right to Information Act, 2005 between June 6 and 8 with four public authorities: the Revenue Department and District Disaster Management Authority, the Labour Department of the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board, and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. 

Replies continued to arrive until July 20. Thirty three of the seventy interviews were conducted in North district, at Model Town and Majnu ka Tila, which we treat as the audit's deep case; the other six districts are confirmatory spread.

The audit asks what kind of vulnerable body the State knows how to recognise, and which workers remain invisible even within a policy written in their name. The seventy interviews and the RTI record are set against each other to answer it.

Our primary hurdle remained the opacity of information from the government. We still have not been able to access the Heat Action Plan 2026 and have relied on new reports along with the action plans for 2024 and 2025 to deduce what the Heat action plan for this year looks like. We also came across the order to deploy heat relief units in Delhi through one of our RTI responses. Access to any information regarding the heat action plan and what administrative processes the government has set in place to develop and implement the plan were not available on any government portal. This information was almost evaded in the RTI responses as well. While we had first set out to understand how cooling zones and relief vans work across the city, the form of our questionnaires and the scope of the audit changed its shape when we could not even locate these cooling zones without canvassing areas when they were initially released. Over time, we would find these cooling zones on our way to speak to workers across districts. Set against the lack of almost any information, we conducted this field study to then figure out what parameters, eligibility criterion and financial considerations did the government undertake to identify heat as an extreme weather, if not a disaster, to undertake an action plan for workers which was impossible even for researchers to find.