Relying on sacks to beat the heat

BHUBANESWAR, India — Kumari Behera carefully folds a set of heavy brown jute sacks, stacking them in a corner of her small, windowless shack.

Splashed with water every two hours and arrayed on her tin roof, they have served as her air conditioning this summer — the only option available to cool her home in the face of increasingly brutal summer heat.

The 54-year-old is sure she’ll need the sacks again next summer.

This year temperatures in Bhubaneswar, a city near the coast in eastern India, did not reach last year’s record mark of 46.8 C.

But stiflingly high humidity, combined with surging heat, nonetheless made city temperatures “feel” above 50 C in April and May, experts said.

And the heat is starting earlier. March this year began with temperatures of nearly 38 C, 4 degrees hotter than normal, according to the Indian meteorological office, which began issuing heat warnings in 15 Indian states that month.

Most of us spent nights on straw mats outside the huts without even a sigh of a breeze ...” Kumari Behera, a maid from the Indian state of Odisha

“By mid-March the house was burning like my wood cookstove,” said Behera, who works as a maid. Her family, migrants from the cyclone-prone Ganjam district in the state of Odisha, squats with 11 other families on a legally disputed plot near the city’s bus stand.

“Most of us spent nights on straw mats outside the huts without even a sigh of a breeze anywhere, only able to sleep closer to dawn for around three to four hours,” she said.

“Then we’d have to go inside because it was like sleeping on a public street — and we had to go for work anyway.”

Lipika Nanda, a public health expert who leads the Indian Institute of Public Health in Bhubaneswar in Odisha, said the city’s poorest face the biggest challenges from rising heat.

“Slum populations are one of the most-at-risk groups to heat waves in Bhubaneswar because not only are their living quarters overcrowded (but) the tin and asbestos roofs trap the heat, with additional heat coming from cooking on open, solid-fuel stoves,” she said.

One problem that needs more attention, Nanda said, is how exposure to extreme heat is affecting people already suffering from ongoing health conditions.

“What is worrying is that presence of chronic conditions and chronic medication (which can) make already at-risk people up to four times more vulnerable to heat,” she said.

Respiratory diseases, high blood pressure, cardiac problems, skin infection and diabetes are chronic ailments commonly found in India’s slums, according to a 2015 survey by the International Institute for Population Sciences.