Opinion | India’s Cooling Dilemma: Efficiency, Equity & The Energy Equation

India is cooling faster than it can afford and warming faster than it can survive. Our growth story has long been told through the symbols of its rising comfort: air conditioners humming in middle-class households, glass-towered sealed against the heat, and fans spinning over crowded public infrastructure. Yet, behind the rising comfort lies a quiet paradox: the more India cools, the more it warms. As heatwaves become increasingly prolonged and nights fail to cool, the rapidly growing demand for residential cooling is becoming both a social necessity and an environmental dilemma.

In 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that India’s power demand for just air conditioners could potentially exceed Africa’s total electricity consumption

by 2050. Air conditioner ownership in India has increased three-fold since 2010, reaching 24 units per 100 households, due to rising temperatures. Meanwhile, electricity consumption resulting from space cooling has increased by 21 per cent between 2019 and 2022. This reflects both a growing aspiration and a survival response to climate stress. As thermal comfort becomes a marker of both progress and protection, its benefits remain deeply uneven.

For instance, state-level surveys show a large variation in access to cooling appliances. While northern states like Punjab and Gujarat have higher shares of households with coolers or ACs, eastern states such as Bihar and West Bengal belong to the group with the lowest shares. This divergence between the needs of the people and access to resources creates “thermal inequality”, a gap that underscores India’s broader inequities in health, housing, and infrastructure. Its consequences are not merely about discomfort but about health and survival. The poorest households, often living in densely populated and poorly ventilated structures, face heightened risks of heat stroke, dehydration, indoor air pollution, and productivity loss. In many of Delhi’s informal settlements, indoor temperatures routinely exceed outdoor temperatures by 4-6°C, turning small tin and concrete rooms into dangerous heat traps for families with limited financial means to purchase modern, low-carbon comfort. Addressing thermal inequality demands coordinated steps that expand efficient thermal protection and improve climate-sensitive housing for heat-vulnerable households.

The Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation’s report, “Optimal Cooling Pathways for India”, projects that India’s residential cooling emissions could double by 2037 under a business-as-usual scenario, surpassing 700 million tonnes of CO₂. This finding reveals that India’s indoor heating challenge is not technical but institutional—the real constraint lies in coordination rather than capability. Recognising this gap, India introduced the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP) in 2019 to provide a unified framework for sustainable and equitable cooling. However, without accountability and rigorous institutional convergence, even the most ambitious frameworks risk remaining on paper. The objective is to reframe the concept of thermal comfort as a public good, an element of basic infrastructure akin to sanitation or clean water. Just as energy access was treated as a national mission through Saubhagya, thermal comfort must be recognised as a productivity imperative.

Translating that vision into reality requires a hierarchy of action:

The first step is to focus on how homes are built, not what is plugged into them. India constructs nearly 15 million new homes every year, yet most still follow designs that trap heat instead of deflecting it. A study conducted by researchers in the Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar, finds that simple interventions, such as cool roofs and shaded façades, can lower indoor temperatures by 4-6°C and reduce energy use by 20-25 per cent. States like Telangana and Gujarat have already piloted “Cool Roof” programmes with measurable success. Hyderabad alone has installed over 300,000 square metres of reflective roofing since 2020. Replicating such initiatives through mandatory cool-roof codes, led jointly by MoHUA and state housing boards, could institutionalise climate-smart design. This could be the ideal pathway to begin with, as such design reforms are low-cost and yield larger public health benefits.

The second priority is to transform the thermal comfort market from an awareness-driven to an affordability-driven approach. CLASP India’s analysis shows that bulk procurement and targeted incentive models could reduce inverter-AC prices by 5-15 per cent. Embedding such efficiency targets into the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme could accelerate domestic manufacturing of high-efficiency components. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), in collaboration with DISCOMs, could pilot state-level “Efficient AC-Missions” to subsidise top-rated models for lower and middle-income households. This coordinated procurement and subsidy model can make efficiency a mass product rather than a luxury preference.

Finally, indoor cooling demand must be decoupled from carbon intensity. If even 20 per cent of India’s urban households were to install small 2-3 kW rooftop systems, daytime loads could be met almost entirely through solar power, saving an estimated 15 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. States like Gujarat and Maharashtra have successfully adopted net-metering models. These could be evolved into “Solar-Cooling Corridors” in integrated urban clusters where thermal comfort and renewables are co-planned to balance grid stress. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and state nodal agencies could jointly design this framework under India’s Renewable Energy Mission.

None of these interventions can succeed without institutional coherence. Thermal comfort regulations in India are currently spread across multiple ministries, lacking unified accountability. What could bridge this gap is the creation of a National Coordination Task Force, co-chaired by MoHUA and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, which would align mandates, coordinate funding flows, and ensure that national emission-reduction targets translate into state-level enforcement and measurable outcomes. Such a task force is administratively feasible, as India already operates inter-ministerial platforms, such as the National Clean Air Programme, which successfully aligns ministries and states under shared targets. Extending this model would build on an existing culture of coordination.

It is only through coherence as such that India can transform its space cooling efforts from a fragmented set of policy decisions into a national mission for equitable thermal comfort, one that cools without carbon, empowers without exclusion, and builds resilience for the heat yet to come. The task ahead is clear: India’s space cooling future must not become its warming fate.

Dr Megha Jain is Assistant Professor, Shyam Lal College, University of Delhi. Bishal Kalita is Research Assistant, Pahle India Foundation. The author is National Spokesperson of the BJP. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.