Shriya Naidu

This summer, some households in Delhi decided to record what heat actually does to their lives, loss of income, missed work, dehydration cases, reduced mobility, water access, and more. Not with just ambient temperature, but through their own lived experiences. They recorded sleepless nights. They documented how rising temperatures increased stress, frustration, and conflict at home. They wrote about losing work and income because it became impossible to work outdoors. They described children struggling to study or complete homework in unbearably hot homes. They kept record of increasing electricity bills, medical expenses, and the many invisible impacts of heat that rarely appear in research papers or policy discussions. These stories, testimonies, and records became Garmi Khata, a community led people’s registry that aims to translate lived experience into evidence. What makes it powerful is its ownership. It is not a survey conducted from outside. It is a community maintained record that turns everyday experience into documented climate evidence. Yesterday, these households submitted their Garmi Khata to the NHRC, calling on it to acknowledge the human rights impacts of extreme heat and to recognise heat as a human rights issue that demands urgent action. I feel this opens up a larger discourse on how climate impacts are measured, whose data counts, and how communities are already building their own systems of accountability when official frameworks fall short.