People in Singareni Colony – partly an off-grid urban informal settlement and partly a VAMBAY housing colony in south-east Hyderabad – live in houses that feel like blazing ovens. Even getting some quality sleep becomes a far cry in the summer. Sandwiched between different kinds of heat-trapping material and walls of congested houses without ample ventilation, the residents find it difficult to sleep and get some needed rest to adapt to the heat. Data from the Heat Perception Survey, collected by a team of researchers under the project Cool Infrastructures in 2023, show some insights into Singareni Colony’s experiences with sleep in the everyday heat of the summer.
The heat perception data, coupled with climatic data collected from Singareni Colony, show that there is a clear correlation between temperature and comfort. As temperatures steadily rose, from March to May, people’s discomfort in relation to sleep kept increasing too.
Although the temperature came down only a little in the first half of June, people in Singareni Colony had already started experiencing slightly less discomfort. There were more winds in June than in May and that alleviated some discomfort. The climatic data also show increased winds in June. In the words of a respondent,
“It is definitely not much cooler [than May]. But since June 8, there’s a time in the evening from 6:30 PM to 9 PM, when there is a good breeze; now we don’t even have to use a pedestal fan while sitting outside like we did in the month of May.”
– A respondent from Singareni Colony (Author’s field notes, June 10, 2023)
Throughout these months, people struggled to cool down even in the night. The houses in the neighbourhoods of Singareni Colony are very small, densely packed together and lack the ventilation required for the heat to escape. Many of them are closely surrounded by two or three houses, with no space in between for a window to operate. Houses in the off-grid settlement are made up of different materials: tarpaulin, tin or asbestos roofs, stone floors and concrete or asbestos walls. They do not have concrete roofs – something that would make their dwellings “permanent” – due to their lack of pattas or land titles. On the other hand, even though the VAMBAY housing colony has concrete walls and roofs – as well as land titles – the flats are packed suffocatingly close to each other. These materials and the densely packed concrete become receptacles for the day’s heat, releasing it late into the night and making the nights too hot to sleep.
“While trying to sleep, the heat becomes more noticeable. In the day, while being engaged in work, it is relatively easier to not notice the heat.”
– a respondent on discomfort during sleep (Perception Survey data)
Our bodies require quality sleep and rest at night to cool off and heal from the constant onslaught of direct heat during the day. This is even more crucial for people in low-income neighbourhoods like Singareni Colony, who largely carry out physically strenuous labour, including auto driving, construction work, paid and unpaid domestic work, street vending, etc. It is also crucial for people with illnesses exacerbated by heat. Concerningly, the data show that the discomfort people feel while sleeping does not improve much at night, robbing people of this much-needed rest.
While 55% of responses indicated discomfort while sleeping in the afternoons (39% Very Uncomfortable, 16% Somewhat Uncomfortable), 43% of responses reported discomfort while sleeping in the night (24% Very Uncomfortable, 19% Somewhat Uncomfortable).
In our fieldwork in Singareni Colony, people have reported the problems they face while trying to sleep and the measures they take to try and alleviate them. They reported feeling so hot inside their houses at night that they sweat a lot and cannot fall asleep. It is much worse when they have power cuts and cannot use cooling appliances. Electricity in a large section of Singareni Colony is flimsy, as many households cannot establish formal electricity connections, due to lack of land tenure. The ones with formal connections also deal with flimsy electrical wires. This affects their ability to use cooling appliances as well.
This points us to the reality of heat adaptation in Singareni Colony. Even simple adaptations to heat – especially water- and energy- reliant adaptations – are not easy to use here. As simple as the mechanism of wetting the floors for thermal comfort is, it relies on water. The lack of water infrastructure effects their ability to use the easiest mechanisms for heat relief.
People try to find relief from hot nights in many ways, and not all are successful. Respondents reported waking up multiple times in the middle of the night to wet their bodies and bedding to cool themselves down. They take a walk outside to escape the heat inside their homes. Quite a few responses mentioned using fans and air coolers to cool down. But for some, even cooling appliances present problems: the fans, built too close to the roofs, circulate unbearably hot air in the room, and the air coolers do not have enough space or ventilation to function and instead, up the humidity in the room.
While some have mentioned that they have better sleep quality when they sleep outside or keep their doors open, there are also concerns about privacy and safety in doing so. In the words of a respondent who is a mother of two,
“You can see how the house is. It is very small and congested (chaala iruku-iruku). There is only one pedestal fan for all of us to share. There is not even one window. I think about keeping the doors open while sleeping but it scares me. I fear someone might come in and kidnap my children or that something might get stolen. So even if we open the doors while sleeping in the night, we have to constantly guard our house, and that leaves me without sleep.”
– a respondent from Singareni Colony (Author’s field notes, May 25 2023)
Comfort while sleeping also varies across housing typologies – kutcha, semi-pukka and pukka. Due to the different materials used in their make-up, the heat exposure varies too. Between pukka and semi-pukka houses, people in semi-pukka houses reported high discomfort (“very uncomfortable”) more frequently than people in pukka houses. However, this distinction is not very simple to state.
From our fieldwork, people living in pukka houses of the VAMBAY buildings, especially closer to the terrace, have also more often reported high discomfort and problems arising out of the heat they are exposed to. The walls of their houses have direct exposure to the heat and the houses have very little ventilation. The concrete walls of their houses, although much more insulating than kutcha and semi-pukka houses in the day, are better containers of heat and hold onto the heat much longer. In the night, they release this heat slowly.
The climatic data from Singareni Colony’s houses show that overnight indoor temperatures of a pukka house fall at a much lower rate than the overnight outdoor temperatures. However, in the case of a semi-pukka house, the afternoon indoor temperatures exceed outdoor temperatures. Kutcha houses imitated – and sometimes exceeded – the outdoor temperatures. This tells us that indoor temperatures are very dependent on the materials used, and this difference can be drastic.
In light of these insights from the field, it becomes important to (re)think about heat adaptation in low-income, off-grid neighbourhoods of a city. Behavioural changes and heat-mitigation strategies at the individual level are not nearly enough. There is an urgent need to make resources like electricity and water more accessible to low-income neighbourhoods and make these houses less congested, better insulated and better ventilated.
Research supporting this post was supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC), UK Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) for the project, Cool Infrastructures: Life with Heat in the Off-Grid City (Award No: ES/T008091/1).