The cost of India’s unbearable heat
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2023
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
The Post’s Annie Gowen walks us through the immediate effects of climate change on India’s megacities and what the future looks like for residents of Kolkata facing record-breaking heat.
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After three days of no power this April, the people of Kasia Bagan had had enough. Temperatures were reaching record highs, with no AC to help. Yet down the main lane of the neighborhood, the Quest Mall towered, humming with electrical power.
Residents such as Sana Mumtaz, a divorced mother of three who lives on the lane with eight relatives in one room, felt her neighbors’ anger growing out of control.
The news of heat-related deaths in the neighborhood spread, resulting in protestors occupying the Quest Mall. Mumtaz, facing heat-related illnesses while providing for her family of nine, felt frustrated.
“It is so hot,” she said, “we cannot survive this way.”
The suburbs of Kolkata are significantly cooler while the temperatures of poorer neighborhoods such as Kasia Bagan remain unbearable. As the rich continue to adopt air conditioning and the poor do not, access to air conditioning during extreme heat waves makes the difference between life and death.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So, if you walk down this one particular lane in the city of Kolkata, you'll see this |
| 0:13.7 | really remarkable sight. |
| 0:15.0 | It's a very narrow lane. |
| 0:17.4 | It's not wide enough to drive a car through, so people have motorcycles and scooters. |
| 0:24.6 | There's laundry strung all the way up and down, you know, so you're sort of walking through |
| 0:28.7 | and there's clothes flapping above your head. |
| 0:32.2 | This past summer, Annie Gowen was in Kolkata in eastern India to report on how climate |
| 0:37.2 | change is already impacting this huge densely packed city. |
| 0:42.0 | And we've spent a time in a neighborhood called Kasi of Agarn, which is a very low income |
| 0:46.4 | neighborhood with no running water in some homes. |
| 0:49.9 | And Annie says that, as you walk through this neighborhood of about 7,000 people, you |
| 0:54.8 | will see an extraordinary contrast. |
| 0:58.1 | There's these sort of boxy, concrete apartment buildings on either side, very close together, |
| 1:05.0 | you know, with these rooms where many people live in one room, do you turn left? |
| 1:09.8 | And there's a cow who lives in one of the side lanes under a tarpuline and then you cross |
| 1:15.1 | a very busy street and then the mall is right there in front of you and it sort of towers |
| 1:19.4 | up several flights. |
| 1:24.2 | So when you're walking these very narrow lanes of the slum area, you know, you can see |
| 1:29.7 | this, the blue glass facade of the mall, you know, sort of soaring in the sky above all |
| 1:35.2 | this. |
| 1:37.1 | In the middle of this poor working-class neighborhood, there is a big glass shopping mall called |
| 1:42.3 | the Quest Mall. |
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