Electric AC could be the final straw for India’s traditional grass-and-water ‘desert coolers’
In summers past, the onset of the dry heat in north India was marked by desert coolers coming to life.
Installed on stilts outside ground-floor windows, or perched on ledges abutting upper-floor apartments, coolers were distinctive contraptions – their cuboid bodies made of grey-green metal, and their fans making a loud mechanical hum.
Until the 1990s, desert coolers were the best weapon middle-class families could wield against the summer.
Air conditioners were too expensive and used too much electricity. Ceiling fans merely stirred the hot air. Coolers, though, were cheap – only a couple of thousand rupees (About Dh100) per unit, compared to the tens of thousands of rupees for an AC – and they used very little power. With coolers, you were paying, really, only for a metal cage with an inbuilt fan. Their slatted sides held mats of khus – a fragrant grass, called vetiver in English, which was used even by Mughal kings five centuries ago.
To use the desert cooler, a sixth of it is filled with water, and its khus mats drenched.
The hot air outdoors cools as it passes through the mats into the cage. Then, as the water evaporates, the air within the cage cools further, and the fan blows cool air into the room.
“We started switching the coolers on in mid-April, and the next few months would be spent arguing about whose turn it was to top up the water inside,” said Aditya Arora, a Delhi accountant.
“You could really only use the cooler until June or July. After that, the monsoon set in, and the cooler’s air became too humid for comfort,” Mr Arora said. “But for those two or three months, the cooler made life bearable.”
But as Indian families grew wealthier over the past two decades and as the prices of air conditioners dropped, the desert cooler began to disappear. That makes Muhammad Muzammil a member of a fast-dwindling tribe.
Mr Muzammil, 19, sells khus mats. His father started the
‘I still sometimes miss the sweet smell of khus in the summer. It’s a nostalgia thing. It’s the smell of my childhood’
business nearly two decades ago, and his customers included those who bought new coolers and those who replaced their older, frazzled mats with fresh ones, as advised, every summer.
At the time, Mr Muzammil remembered, “my father used to sell 40,000 or 50,000 sets of mats in a single summer”.
Mr Muzammil buys the mats wholesale, and machines cut and compress the khus into compact mats. But sales shrunk as air conditioners have replaced coolers. Now Mr Muzammil and his father barely touch the 20,000 mark.
Other salesmen have it even worse. Mohammad Akram manages only 2,000 to 3,000 sales a summer.
“The AC has become the norm,” Mr Akram said. “Even if families can’t afford to purchase one outright, they’ll buy it and pay in instalments.”
His, too, is a family business. “My uncle used to do this, and I used to watch him as a kid,” he said. Now he wonders if the business will survive at all.
The khus business was always a seasonal one. Once the monsoon arrives, and through the rest of the year leading up to the next summer, Mr Muzammil labours on construction sites.
He admits that desert coolers can be a nuisance to maintain.
“Every year you need to buy these khus mats,” he said. “Then you have to refill these coolers with water every day or two.”
Water supplies become erratic in Delhi’s hot summer, so there is little to spare for the cooler. The stagnant water in the cooler can also become a breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes.
“People worry they’ll catch dengue,” Mr Muzammil said.
Also, as peak summer temperatures climbed over the past two decades, coolers have struggled to cope. “Whereas with an AC, once you’ve installed it, then you don’t have to look after it any more,” he said. The electricity bills are higher, “but most people don’t seem to care about that these days”.
Desert coolers were best suited for homes, Mr Arora said. It is difficult to imagine the large offices of India’s modern cities being kept cool by anything other than air conditioning.
Mr Arora’s family replaced their own desert coolers years ago, and he is very glad for the icy breath that greets him when he comes indoors from the heat.
“But I still sometimes miss that sweet smell of khus in the summer,” he said. “It’s a nostalgia thing, I guess. It’s the smell of my childhood.”