India’s informal workforce is increasingly struggling to cope with intensifying heat as rising daytime temperatures and warmer nights reduce opportunities for physical recovery, according to workers, researchers and a new regional study examining the impact of extreme heat across major Asian cities.

In Delhi, where temperatures have climbed above 45 degrees Celsius during recent heatwaves, delivery rider Jalaj Jha begins his workday already fatigued. The 24-year-old gig worker, who delivers groceries on a motorbike, said sleep has become increasingly difficult in the summer months because of the heat trapped inside his small rented room.

Jha, who lives in accommodation with limited ventilation and relies on a fan that circulates warm air, said he often sleeps only three to four hours a night. By the time he starts preparing for work in the morning, he already feels physically exhausted. His daily shift lasts about 12 hours, exposing him to prolonged outdoor temperatures that continue to rise through the day.

Delhi this week recorded its hottest day in May in two years and its warmest May night in 14 years, underscoring a broader trend identified by climate researchers across South Asia. Scientists have warned that night-time temperatures in many parts of the region are increasing faster than daytime temperatures, reducing the hours traditionally available for cooling and recovery after extreme heat exposure.

A report released by the United States-based organization People’s Courage International (PCI) found that rising overnight temperatures, combined with the urban heat island effect, are creating worsening conditions for millions of informal workers across South and South-East Asia. The urban heat island effect refers to the tendency of densely built urban areas to retain heat absorbed during the day, keeping temperatures elevated after sunset.

The study examined conditions in Delhi, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Jakarta and Quezon City. Researchers concluded that many workers are beginning their workdays in a state of accumulated fatigue because they are unable to cool down adequately during the night.

The report focused on workers employed in sectors that require prolonged exposure to outdoor conditions, including delivery services, construction and street vending. Many of these workers live in densely populated settlements where access to ventilation, cooling equipment and reliable electricity remains limited.Researchers said the inability to recover physically during the night is contributing to a range of health and economic pressures. Workers interviewed for the study described increasing difficulty maintaining productivity, higher spending on coping measures and greater vulnerability to heat-related illness.

According to PCI, nearly eight in ten of the more than 2,200 internal migrant workers surveyed across the five cities reported that extreme heat was affecting their livelihoods or household conditions. Respondents said they were losing income because they could not complete full work shifts during periods of extreme heat.

Many also reported spending additional money on drinking water, transportation, medicines and other heat-related necessities.The study documented widespread reports of headaches, dizziness, fatigue and reduced work capacity during prolonged exposure to high temperatures. Researchers said these effects often develop gradually rather than through dramatic medical emergencies, making the broader impact of heat difficult to recognize despite its cumulative consequences.

“Heat impacts are silent and generally creep up on workers,” PCI researcher Ameena Kidwai said. She noted that workers described heat-related disruptions not only during working hours but also during commuting, at home and in their broader social lives. The effects, she said, extended to mental wellbeing and community interactions.

The findings come as climate scientists warn that global warming is increasing the likelihood and severity of heatwaves across South Asia. Researchers have projected that climate change could significantly increase the probability of prolonged pre-monsoon heatwaves in the region. Last month, a 15-day heatwave affected large areas of South Asia and was linked to fatalities.

The International Labour Organization estimates that more than 70 percent of workers across Asia are exposed to excessive heat during at least part of their employment. The risks are particularly significant in countries such as India, where nearly 90 percent of workers are employed in the informal economy and often lack workplace protections available in formal sectors.

Ajay Kumar, a 32-year-old vegetable vendor working in Gurugram near Delhi, said extreme heat has become a daily challenge. Kumar purchases produce from a wholesale market approximately seven kilometers from where he sells vegetables and transports the goods using a three-wheeled rickshaw through heavy traffic.

He said the heat frequently causes dizziness while he works, but economic pressures leave little room to reduce his hours. Kumar supports a family of six and migrated from Bihar four years ago in search of employment opportunities.Living conditions further compound the challenge. Kumar, his wife and four children occupy a single room with minimal ventilation and only a basic fan for cooling.

He said he had hoped to purchase an air cooler before summer but could not afford the expense.According to Kumar, his daily earnings generally range between 300 and 400 rupees, with most of the income devoted to household necessities. To manage the heat, he carries water and keeps a damp scarf around his head while working.Even after returning home, relief is limited.

During particularly hot nights, Kumar and his family sleep on the open terrace of their building because indoor temperatures remain too high for comfort. Despite moving outdoors, he said it can still take several hours before he is able to fall asleep.Governments across the region have introduced measures aimed at reducing heat-related risks. Delhi authorities have implemented heat action plans that include public advisories, early warning systems, water distribution points and recommendations encouraging the rescheduling of outdoor work during the hottest parts of the day.

Researchers, however, said many existing responses remain focused on immediate heat emergencies rather than the broader issue of recovery and living conditions. They argued that policies addressing housing quality, ventilation, access to cooling and worker protections will become increasingly important as temperatures continue to rise.

The PCI report found that for many workers, the most significant impact of extreme heat is not limited to the hours spent outdoors. Instead, it is the growing inability to recover between shifts, creating what researchers described as a “recovery deficit” that leaves workers physically depleted before each new workday begins.

For years, she wanted a child. After a decade of waiting, hope and uncertainty, pregnancy finally arrived carrying both joy and fear in equal measure. What followed, however, was not the soft, instinctive transition into motherhood that culture often promises, but a physically traumatic birth, emotional numbness and a long struggle to recognise herself in her new life.

During pregnancy, she found herself largely alone. Her husband, though supportive and loving, was frequently absent, consumed by the demands of a startup consultancy he had recently founded with two academic partners.

Medical appointments, including an amniocentesis prompted by concerns over possible chromosomal abnormalities, were often faced without him because he was abroad for work.

She attended prenatal classes, but support systems felt limited. Only one person in her close circle had children, and her relationship with her own mother, who lived in Italy, was strained. The isolation deepened her anxiety, particularly because childbirth itself frightened her.

When she raised those fears with her general practitioner, she recalls receiving a familiar reassurance that did little to ease them.“Don’t worry, birth isn’t an illness,” her male GP told her. “It’s all perfectly natural.”She felt the dismissal ignored her lived reality. She was asthmatic and suffering from undiagnosed endometriosis that caused severe pain every few weeks.

Pregnancy did not feel simple or natural. It felt uncertain and medically significant.Still, she felt deeply connected to the child growing inside her. She recognised her daughter through movement alone—the shape of limbs pressing against skin, strong kicks in response to passing sirens, a physical presence both strange and intimate.

She imagined a temperament already forming: long legs like her father, a temper like her own.She expected love to be immediate. After waiting so long, how could it not be?Her due date passed. Then another week.

Then another. At more than 44 weeks pregnant, she says she had to insist repeatedly before her GP agreed to induction. Only when hospital monitoring showed signs of fetal distress did medical staff finally intervene and break her waters.

Labour lasted 20 hours.

She describes induced labour not as a gradual progression but as a sudden collapse into nausea, pain and exhaustion. Hours passed with no progress. She was unable to receive an epidural at first because she was not dilating. The pain became all-consuming.

At one point, fearing the worst, she asked her husband to make a promise: if doctors had to choose between saving her life and their child’s, he should choose the baby.“I am not going to lose either of you,” he replied.

She remembers University College Hospital at the time as a place that inspired little confidence—a crumbling Victorian building with filthy bathrooms, blood on the floors and junior doctors exhausted by punishing shifts. Around her, the maternity ward echoed with the sounds of women in labour: groans, cries, gasps and fear.Eventually she received an epidural, but the baby remained stuck.

Just before midnight, an emergency forceps delivery and episiotomy were performed. Her husband later told her there were 13 people in the room.Then their daughter arrived.She weighed just under 4.5 kilograms—almost 10 pounds.

The mother had lost so much blood that the experience felt, in her words, like surviving a car crash. Her husband, standing in blood-soaked jeans, was overwhelmed with joy.“Isn’t she wonderful?” he said.She felt nothing.

She describes the absence of emotion not as rejection, but as total numbness, as though the epidural that had numbed her body had also severed access to feeling. She spent the night awake in the recovery ward waiting for the expected rush of maternal love that never came, listening to other women crying as anaesthesia wore off.

Instead, she felt transported back to boarding school dormitories, where she had learned early to suppress everything except anger.“Rage has served me quite often as a stimulant against exhaustion,” she writes. “Every woman who goes through childbirth has, I believe, been through the equivalent of war.

”She compares childbirth to trauma rather than celebration, arguing that many women leave the experience carrying symptoms closer to post-traumatic stress than to joy.

She believes poor maternity care intensified that reality.Her experience took place during years of severe strain on Britain’s National Health Service, when long-term underfunding and overstretched staff affected standards of care.

But she also sees a broader cultural issue: motherhood itself, she argues, is often insufficiently respected.At the time, general practice and obstetrics were still dominated by men.

She does not argue that male doctors cannot provide excellent care, but believes many failed to understand how dangerous childbirth could still be, or how often women’s pain was normalised rather than addressed.She was discharged the next day after a blood transfusion and severe physical trauma. She could barely walk.

Her husband worried about her physical recovery, but neither of them recognised the mental damage taking shape beneath it.When the baby began crying—night after night, almost without pause motherhood became a contest between exhaustion and fury.

“Once our baby began to cry relentlessly every night, all night, it felt like a battle between my rage and hers,” she recalls.Then one day, something changed.Her daughter, whose eyes had until then seemed distant and unfocused, suddenly looked directly at her. Then came a smile—clear, unmistakable and full.It was not simply recognition. It felt like acceptance.

“She seemed not only to recognise me, but to greet me with unconditional love and delight,” she writes.She understood intellectually that infant smiles are biological survival mechanisms, but the emotional impact was overwhelming.

The joy felt so sharp it was almost painful.“Oh!” she remembers saying. “It’s you. It’s you.”That first smile altered everything.The sleepless nights did not disappear. The crying continued. But something fundamental shifted in her understanding of motherhood, of love and even of her own mother.

Her relationship with her mother, long marked by pain and distance, softened. She began to understand her mother’s own unresolved grief and emotional absences not simply as cruelty, but as the result of childhood bereavement and wounds never healed.Motherhood brought not only responsibility, but perspective.

As a writer, she found that literature had offered little preparation for the reality of childbirth. Victorian novels she loved moved quickly past pregnancy and motherhood, treating them as narrative transitions rather than lived experiences.

Even contemporary women writers often avoided describing the devastation of birth itself.When she included the physical brutality of childbirth in her 1996 novel A Vicious Circle, critics attacked what one reviewer called “revolting details.”

Yet she says she had still softened the truth, giving her fictional heroine an instant maternal bond she herself had not felt.Years later, much changed. Hospitals improved. Her GP practice became staffed by younger, mostly women doctors. She had a second child, a son, whose birth was entirely different and with whom she bonded immediately.

Her daughter, Leon, grew into a novelist herself—healthy, loving and brilliant.Looking back, she says motherhood brought both unimaginable suffering and extraordinary love.

Public conversation often reduces it to either sentimental joy or unbearable hardship. The truth, she argues, is both.And if the early days felt like darkness, what remained was not the trauma alone, but the light that followed.