Stay hydrated and offer a glass of water to others; if someone around you feels unusually unwell, move them to a place with shade and offer water. These are important reminders during a heatwave. It is also common sense. And, importantly, an act of basic empathy that reasonable people extend to others anyway. While appropriate and necessary, what such a reminder does is subtly shift the responsibility of combating the brutal heat on to individuals and allow the institutional mechanisms to remain unaccountable.

We are no longer in the time of the dreaded and infamous Mumbai heat. In these new normal times, readings for daytime and night temperatures threaten to go off the charts. For a decade now, daytime temperatures in March, April, and May have been in the extremely high 30 degrees Celsius range and have breached the 40 degrees Celsius barrier at least thrice for every month. This means the feels-like temperature, or the heat index, which should become the default reading, would have been closer to 45 degrees Celsius or higher.

Heat beyond individual responsibility

In such scorching temperatures over three months, as millions of people work outdoors every day and millions struggle with trapped heat in the informal settlements that they are forced to live in, a glass of water is not a solution. Ground work has repeatedly shown that many cannot afford to buy water every day of the summer months; many, especially women, make do with less hydration because public sanitation facilities either do not exist or........

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