The Cool Trap: How India Can Beat The Heat Without Heating The Planet

On 5 July last year, Srinagar recorded 37.4 degrees Celsius — its hottest July day in over seven decades. In a valley once synonymous with houseboats, chinar shade and snow-fed breezes, appliance dealers reported air-conditioner sales doubling, with queues in Anantnag, Baramulla and Kulgam. When Kashmir buys ACs in bulk, something fundamental has shifted in India's climate story. And when Shimla logs temperatures nearly eight degrees above normal in March, when Ooty's summer spells creep past comfort, when even Leh's traditionally cool masonry homes begin to feel the sun differently, the message is unambiguous: the geography of Indian cooling demand is being redrawn by the climate itself.

This is the cool trap. Rising heat drives us to buy cooling machines; the machines consume electricity generated substantially from coal and leak refrigerants thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide; the resulting emissions push temperatures higher still; and hotter cities — amplified by the urban heat island effect and the waste heat that every AC dumps onto the street — drive yet more people to the appliance store. It is a feedback loop with a compressor at its heart, and India sits at its epicentre.

The arithmetic of artificial chill

The numbers deserve a moment of sober attention. Air-conditioning already accounts for around 7 per cent of global electricity use and roughly 3 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions, as MIT Technology Review reminds us in its recent survey of next-generation cooling. Count the full cooling economy — refrigerants, refrigeration and the power that feeds them — and the share of global emissions approaches 7 per cent. The International Energy Agency projects that the world's stock of AC units will triple by 2050; without aggressive efficiency gains, cooling alone could then consume as much electricity as China and India together use for everything today.

None of this is an argument against cooling. A Lancet study estimated that air-conditioning prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths in 2019 alone. In an India of intensifying heatwaves — 536 heatwave days were recorded across the country in the summer of 2024 — access to cooling is not a luxury but a matter of survival, productivity and social justice. The vaccine cold chain, the food economy, the school classroom and the night-shift worker's sleep all depend on it. The question is not whether India cools itself, but how.

China offers a cautionary preview. Its energy demand for space cooling has grown at roughly 13 per cent a year since 2000 — the fastest in the world — and its electricity and heat sector, with HVAC demand as a major driver, is now the single largest-emitting sector on the planet. India's per-capita cooling consumption remains a fraction of China's or America's, but our trajectory is steeper. Indian AC sales have nearly doubled in five years to around 15 million units annually, and industry estimates suggest close to 30 million units a year by 2030. India, in other words, is about to install in a decade what many countries built over half a century. Every one of those machines is a fifteen-year commitment of electricity and refrigerant. The choices we make now will be humming on our rooftops well into the 2040s.

A market racing ahead of its regulators

The commercial stakes are enormous. The global air-conditioner market, valued at around USD 160 billion in 2025, is projected to nearly double to over USD 300 billion by 2035, growing at close to 7 per cent annually. India's HVAC market is expanding at more than double that pace — estimated at about USD 13.5 billion in 2025 and projected to exceed USD 49 billion by 2034, a compound annual growth rate approaching 15 per cent, among the fastest anywhere. Five players — Voltas, Daikin, LG, Blue Star and Samsung — command roughly 55 to 60 per cent of Indian unitary AC sales, with a long tail of domestic manufacturers scaling up under the government's Production Linked Incentive scheme for white goods, a Rs 6,238-crore programme that is onshoring compressors, heat exchangers and BLDC motors that India once imported almost entirely.

The regional pattern of that market tells its own story. North India, with its brutal loo winds and 45-degree Junes, accounts for the largest share of national AC sales — between 29 and 38 per cent by various estimates — led by Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. The south and west follow, with humid coastal cities driving year-round demand. But the most telling data points come from the margins: the 60 per cent jump in AC sales reported by Srinagar dealers, the cooling appliances appearing in Himachal's mid-hills, the ceiling fans and inverter ACs now sold in towns that once advertised themselves as escapes from the heat. When the hill stations — the Nilgiris, the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh's high desert — become AC markets, we are watching climate change monetise itself in real time.

What governments have done — and what hasn't been yet

To its credit, India saw this coming earlier than most. The India Cooling Action Plan of 2019 was the first national strategy anywhere in the world to take a twenty-year, economy-wide view of cooling demand, targeting a 25 to 30 per cent reduction in cooling energy requirements by 2037-38. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency's star-labelling programme has steadily tightened the efficiency floor for room ACs. The Energy Conservation Building Code and its residential sibling, the Eco Niwas Samhita, set envelope and HVAC standards for new construction. From January this year, every star-rated AC sold in India ships with a default setting of 24 degrees Celsius — a nudge that, if half of India's AC users simply accepted it, could save an estimated 10 billion units of electricity and 8.2 million tonnes of CO2 annually. The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act 2022 has created the scaffolding for a domestic carbon market that will eventually price the buildings sector's emissions.

This is a respectable policy architecture. The trouble is enforcement and ambition. ECBC adoption is mandatory only in states that have notified it, and compliance monitoring remains patchy. The star-labelling baseline still lags the best available technology by a wide margin: the most efficient ACs on the global market are nearly twice as efficient as the Indian market average. And the least discussed lever — the building itself — remains largely unpulled. A poorly designed glass box in Gurugram can demand five times the cooling energy of a well-oriented, shaded, insulated building delivering identical comfort.

Panchamrit, LiFE and the buildings we haven't yet built

India's Panchamrit commitments, announced at COP26 — 500 GW of non-fossil capacity by 2030, half our energy from renewables, a billion tonnes of emissions avoided this decade, a 45 per cent cut in emissions intensity, and net zero by 2070 — cannot be met without confronting the built environment, which accounts for roughly 37 to 40 per cent of global energy-related CO2 emissions when construction is included. India's peculiar advantage is that an estimated 70 per cent of the buildings that will exist here in 2050 have not yet been built. We are, in effect, constructing a new Chicago every year. Each of those buildings can either lock in half a century of compressor-driven cooling demand or design much of it away before the first brick is laid.

This is where Mission LiFE, India's behavioural counterpart to its technology missions, earns its place in the cooling debate. Passive design — orientation, shading, thermal mass, ventilation, cool roofs — is the highest-leverage, lowest-cost decarbonisation strategy available in a cooling-dominated climate. Our vernacular traditions knew this: the jaalis of Rajasthan, the deep verandahs, the courtyard house. Recent scholarship at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, has documented how industrialised concrete construction, spreading through Indian villages in imitation of urban typologies, creates measurably hotter interiors and manufactures dependence on fans, coolers and ACs where none existed. SPA's ongoing research programme on the net-zero built environment — anchored by its Department of Building Engineering and Management with the support of NBCC and culminating in the International Conference on Net Zero Carbon Built Environment in New Delhi this November — is building the Indian evidence base for exactly this proposition: that the cheapest ton of cooling carbon is the one a good architect deletes at the drawing board.

The way out of the trap

What, then, should India do? First, treat building envelopes as cooling infrastructure: make ECBC and Eco Niwas Samhita compliance a condition of building sanction in every state, and extend cool-roof programmes from pilot to default. Second, leapfrog on efficiency — ratchet star-label baselines towards world-best performance and use public procurement to bulk-buy super-efficient ACs, as the UJALA programme did for LED bulbs, collapsing prices for everyone. Third, accelerate the refrigerant transition under the Kigali Amendment, moving decisively from high-GWP refrigerants such as R410A — over 2,000 times more warming than CO2 — to low-GWP alternatives like R290 and R32, with strict end-of-life recovery so old units do not vent their chemistry into the sky. Fourth, scale district cooling: the pilots at GIFT City and Amaravati show 40 to 50 per cent energy savings over building-level systems, and every new smart city and transit-oriented development should be evaluated for it, alongside thermal storage that shifts cooling loads to hours when solar power is abundant. Fifth, handle construction & demolition waste properly with focus on circularity.

Finally, watch the technology frontier without waiting for it. MIT Technology Review's survey of solid-state cooling — thermoelectric systems being piloted in apartments, magnetocaloric units headed for supermarkets, elastocaloric and barocaloric devices emerging from laboratories — is properly cautious: none yet matches the efficiency of a good compressor. But as one analyst notes, in a country installing tens of millions of units a decade, even a 5 per cent market share for refrigerant-free cooling would be a very large dent. India, now a globally scaled AC manufacturer under the PLI scheme, should be a maker of these technologies, not merely their eventual market.

The air-conditioner is the emblematic machine of the Anthropocene: a private answer to a collective problem that worsens the problem it answers. India cannot renounce it, and should not — too many lives depend on staying cool. But between the 24-degree default setting on a Srinagar split unit and the net-zero pledge for 2070 lies a single, continuous policy challenge: to deliver thermal comfort as a public good, designed into our buildings and cities, rather than bolted onto their walls one compressor at a time. The country that once taught the world to build for its climate can do so again. The alternative is to keep cooling our rooms by heating our planet — comfort borrowed, at compound interest, from our own children’s summers.

The above article has been written by Sundeep Nayak, who is a Professor of Practice and Chair, Mission LiFE Cell, IIT Goa, where he leads work on lifestyle-led sustainability and the circular economy. Dr. Abhijit Rastogi is an Assistant Professor, Department of Building Engineering and Management, School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi, researching low-carbon construction and building performance. Dr. Kyawt Yin Min Thein is a Sustainability Expert and Researcher with the Net Zero Building Project at SPA New Delhi, working on climate-resilient and net-zero built environments.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the publisher. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information, the publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of this information.