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| New Delhi
By the first week of April, Mohammad Asif could no longer sleep.
The ceiling fan in his rented room in Delhi whirred through the night, pushing hot air from one corner of the room to another. Even after midnight, the heat lingered.
Mr. Asif moved from Kashmir’s cool mountain valleys to India’s capital seven months ago to take up a government job in the education department. He arrived after summer had passed, and assumed he could manage the next one with a fan.
As heat waves intensify across India, air conditioners are shifting from an aspirational good to a survival tool, giving rise to a new AC rental market in major cities. What does it take to stay cool in Delhi?
Then, temperatures began to climb.
“People had warned me about Delhi’s summers, but I thought I would manage,” he says. “Once the heat set in, it became unbearable.”
An air conditioner was not in his budget. Much of his income goes toward supporting his wife, infant daughter, and parents still living in Kashmir, and the cheapest unit would cost nearly a month’s salary. But as the heat intensified, he felt he had little choice. He took out a loan and bought an air conditioner for 30,000 rupees (about $314).
“It didn’t feel like a luxury purchase,” he says. “It felt like a necessity.”
Across India, millions of households are reaching the same conclusion. As heat waves become more frequent and intense across South Asia, air conditioners are rapidly shifting from aspirational consumer goods to essential tools for coping with daily life. Yet access remains deeply unequal. While AC ownership is rising, only about 8% to 10% of India’s roughly 300 million households currently own an air conditioner, leaving hundreds of millions of people exposed to dangerous heat – or turning to a fast-growing AC rental market.
“This trend exposes a deep ‘cooling apartheid’ in India,” says Harjeet Singh, founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, an advocacy organization based in Delhi. “While affluent households run multiple units without a second thought, poorer families are pushed into debt cycles just to keep a single room livable.”
The need for cooling is becoming harder to ignore. Temperatures in Delhi and surrounding states have already touched 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 degrees Fahrenheit) this year, according to government data. In recent years, parts of neighboring Rajasthan have recorded temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). Scientists also warn that densely built cities are trapping heat after sunset, leading to increasingly hot nights and offering little relief after scorching days.
On the hottest days, Assad Khan’s workshop in the south Delhi neighborhood of Abul Fazal grows crowded. Technicians weave between stacks of air conditioners, their phones ringing with constant requests for rentals, servicing, and emergency repairs.
Mr. Khan started his air-conditioner repair business about 25 years ago. As demand for cooling grew, he began refurbishing older units and renting them out, starting with just two machines.
Today, he rents out more than 150.
“Every summer is busier than the last,” he says. “If I had more units and more technicians, I could easily rent out hundreds more.”
The climbing heat has also changed the nature of Mr. Khan’s business. Air conditioners are running for longer hours and under greater strain, leading to more breakdowns and repair calls during the peak summer months.
“The hotter it gets, the harder these machines have to work,” he says. “We’re fixing far more units than we used to.”
Across Delhi, hundreds of rental businesses now offer seasonal air conditioners, typically charging between 7,000 and 15,000 rupees ($73 to 157) for the summer, including installation and servicing.
“Many of our customers simply can’t afford to buy a new AC,” Mr. Khan says. “For them, renting is the only way to get through the summer.”
Air conditioners save lives, but not without a cost.
While cooling Indian homes, the rattling window units rented out in shops across Delhi also release heat into the surrounding environment and place growing pressure on electricity networks. According to the International Energy Agency, India could have more than 1 billion air conditioners in operation by 2050, up from fewer than 50 million in 2020. The agency estimates that every 1 degree Celsius rise in outdoor temperature was associated with roughly a 7-gigawatt increase in India’s peak electricity demand in 2024.
“India is caught in a classic, tragic climate paradox,” says Mr. Singh, who made headlines in January after being detained for his climate activism. “We are largely using fossil fuel-powered energy to cool ourselves from the very warming that burning fossil fuels has caused.”
Breaking the cycle will require cleaning up the power grid and rethinking urban design. In the meantime, “we cannot tell a family suffering in 47 degree Celsius [116.6 degrees Fahrenheit] heat that they shouldn’t buy an AC because of emissions,” he adds. For the 90% of Indians who work in the informal sector, air conditioning is becoming an essential tool to earn a living.
Standing beside his mobile sugarcane juice cart on a busy roadside in Haryana, 18-year-old Soubit Kumar feeds cane stalks into a noisy crushing machine as hot winds sweep across the highway.
Last summer, he realized that if he wanted to keep working through the region’s dizzying heat, he needed an air conditioner at home.
Unable to afford one on his own, he pooled money with his uncle and rented a unit for 8,000 rupees ($83) for the season. Today, Mr. Kumar’s family and his uncle’s family – eight people in all – sleep in a single 10-by-12-foot room where the air conditioner is installed.
“To stand here all day in this heat, I need at least six or seven hours of sleep,” he says over the roar of the crushing machine. “Without the AC, that wasn’t possible.”
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Mr. Kumar, who has been helping support his family since he was 12, no longer views air conditioning as a luxury.
“These days, it feels more important than food,” he says.
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