Scorching Heat Threatens Home-Based Women Workers

She quickly ties her dupatta, lights the stove, and begins rolling out rotis. “I can’t be late,” she says, glancing at the clock and then at the supplies stacked in a corner. “Dinner has to be ready before I start my work.”

For the past five years--ever since she got married--Paro has worked from home, stuffing plastic bottles with chuna (slaked lime) for a nearby tobacco factory. Her family of six lives in a cramped 50-square-foot room where the kitchen, bed, and workspace all blur into one. Each evening, after the family eats, Paro settles on the cement steps outside her home, surrounded by a shallow tub of chuna and hundreds of tiny bottles.

“I get Rs 4 for every 1,000 bottles,” she says. “Only at night can one work. How can anyone do this in the afternoon? You feel faint, your blood pressure spikes or crashes. All you want is to sleep somehow.”

Across Shraddhanand Colony, nearly 200 women like her are engaged in similar home-based work, scattered across rooms and stairwells. Most nights, the pay amounts to no more than Rs 15–25 for almost three hours of effort. But with Delhi’s summers growing more brutal each year, even those slim margins are vanishing. The afternoon heat, often soaring past 45°C, makes it nearly impossible to sit upright, let alone work--pushing what little they can earn into short, late-night shifts.

Like Paro, Gauri Ben’s work begins inside her home. A 38-year-old pheriwali from Raghubir Nagar, she spends her days collecting discarded clothes from affluent neighborhoods in exchange for utensils, a generational trade she inherited from her family. But now, as the temperature soars, Gauri Ben is looking for ways to survive the coming months. “I’ve started asking for domestic work nearby,” she says. “The heat is unbearable. I can’t continue working like I used to.”

In Raghubir Nagar, Delhi, women readies themself to leave for pheri — door-to-door selling in nearby neighborhoods. As heatwaves grow harsher, the line between outside and inside blurs: 'It’s as difficult to be outside as it is to work inside,' she says

After a long, exhausting day of pheri, where the sun beats down on her as she moves from house to house, Gauri Ben returns to her jhuggi, hoping for some relief--but it’s even hotter inside. The tin roof traps the sweltering heat, making it feel like sitting inside a pressure cooker. “The fan just blows hot air around,” she says. “My back burns against the plastic mat, and sometimes, I have to lie down just to stop myself from fainting.”

Inside her cramped home, Gauri Ben sits down to wash, mend, and iron the clothes she’s collected, preparing them for resale in the local market the next morning. But this work, once a daily rhythm, is becoming increasingly difficult. “We used to finish by midnight,” she recalls. “Now, we can’t start until 10 p.m. because of the heat. It’s just too much.”

Gauri Ben, who has been in the recycling trade for as long as she can remember, feels the strain of the extreme heat. “Delhi wasn’t like this before,” she says. “This heat--it’s killing our work, and soon it will kill us too.”

Impact on incomes

Women like Paro and Gauri are far from exceptions. Across India, an estimated 17.2 million women engage in home-based work, 12.5 million of them in non-agricultural sectors, according to a 2020 report by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), based on data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey. This means more than a quarter (26.5%) of all women engaged in paid work other than agriculture work from within their homes.

From rolling papads and stuffing beedis to weaving, embroidery, bindi-pasting, and garment stitching, this vast and largely invisible workforce forms the backbone of many local economies and subcontracted supply chains. While men dominate the public labour market, women in informal settlements--especially those with caregiving responsibilities--are often confined to piecemeal contracts completed behind closed doors. And though the dangers of extreme heat are more visible for outdoor workers, the toll on home-based women workers is no less severe, pushing them further to the margins of an already fragile economy.

Data from SEWA Mahila Housing Trust show a measurable dip in afternoon productivity during peak summer months, with some women reporting up to a 30% decline in output. Another 2020 study suggests a 2% loss in productivity for every degree rise above 25°C in indoor temperature. This heat-induced slowdown has direct financial consequences--according to a 2022 HomeNet South Asia study, 43% of home-based workers reported a decline in income due to climate stress.

India experienced one of its longest and most intense heat waves in 2024. In Delhi, maximum temperatures breached 45°C on multiple occasions through late May and early June, with some areas recording up to 52.3°C. According to the India Meteorological Department, 2024 was the warmest year on record in India since weather data was first maintained in 1901. The annual mean land surface air temperature for the country in 2024 was 0.65°C above the long-term average. Climate scientists warn that such extremes, once anomalies, are now becoming annual fixtures.

In trades where daily earnings for women home-based workers already hover around Rs 24, even minor disruptions can derail a household’s fragile finances.

Living in precarious settlements--often without proper ventilation, water, or electricity--these women are doubly vulnerable. The heat not only slashes their incomes, it also jeopardises their health. The added burden of domestic and caregiving responsibilities, coupled with irregular pay and no social safety net, amplifies their exposure to heat stress. With little respite and fewer options, survival itself becomes a calculation of timing--waiting for the sun to fall just low enough to work again.

Cramped, airless, overheated

Sheela Ben sits hunched over a pile of sequined blouses in her two-room home in Patad Nagar, Ahmedabad, pasting stones onto fabric for most of the day. One room is entirely given over to her embroidery work. “We can’t even run a fan,” she says. “It would blow the fabric around and ruin the design.” The fabric has to lie still, and so does she--sweating in place. The room has no window and barely any ventilation; heat builds up quickly and lingers, turning the space into an oven by midday.

The constraints of such cramped housing magnify the toll of rising temperatures on women home-based workers. “Most women home-based workers in urban India live in cramped, poorly ventilated homes in slum neighbourhoods,” says Shalini Sinha, India country representative at WIEGO. “Their homes aren’t just for living--they’re their workplaces too. And that makes them doubly vulnerable to heat.

“These women are so invisible that even when conversations happen around gig workers or outdoor labourers, they’re often left out,” Sinha says. “There’s a mistaken belief that home-based work is safer from the heat, just because it happens indoors and because it’s done by women. But these aren’t air-conditioned offices. These are tightly packed, badly constructed rooms with no cross-ventilation. The heat doesn’t just enter--it lingers, making work suffocating.”

According to SEWA Mahila Housing Trust, a significant number of home-based workers operate out of single-room units, often no larger than 6.92 square metres (or about 75 sq ft). With no dedicated workspace, women are forced to juggle care responsibilities, household chores, and income-generating activities in the same stifling room.

Poorly built homes make the situation worse. “Our roof is made of asbestos--it traps the heat. It’s unbearable inside during the day, but we still have to work,” Sheela Ben says.

The materials used in home-based work often compound the discomfort. The glue and synthetic fabrics Sheela Ben handles radiates additional heat and releases fumes that make the air nearly unbreathable. When the heat becomes too much to bear indoors, she sometimes shifts her work outside, crouched on the narrow lane in front of her home.

In Mathura’s Nai Basti, women craft gilet anklets together in the remains of their demolished homes. With no permanent roof over their heads, they work under tarpaulin sheets that, in the soaring heat, sometimes begin to burn.

Across the country, similar stories emerge. In interviews conducted by IndiaSpend, women packing plastic goods in Ahmedabad, stitching rubber balls in Jalandhar’s sports industry, or assembling chuna bottles and affixing slipper straps in Delhi, Gilet jewelry makers in Mathura, all described how adhesives, rubber, and synthetic components release noxious fumes and trap heat. “The glue burns your nose,” one worker said. “The heat makes the smell worse--it feels like you're suffocating.”

When the surroundings work against you

The challenges of home-based work often extend beyond the four walls of the house, shaped just as much by the surrounding neighbourhood’s infrastructure as by conditions inside the home. In Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar, for instance, Gori Ben says even basic necessities like water become unreliable during the summer. “By May and June, it’s difficult to get water,” she explains. With jhuggis and houses lacking regular water supply, women depend on public standposts or even the nearby Ghodewala temple. “The taps run dry and even the supply from the Ghodewala mandir becomes irregular. We often have to wait hours, sometimes the whole day, just to collect a few buckets.”

Paro too, faces a similar ordeal. Her household relies on erratic municipal water tankers that sometimes don’t arrive for days. What compounds the problem further is the landfill just across the road from her house. “Every few days, there’s a fire in the landfill,” she says, referring to the Bhalswa landfill. “The air fills with black smoke. My eyes burn, my chest hurts, and it becomes impossible to sit and work even during the night.”

Also, most home-based women workers in India’s urban centres reside in unplanned, underserved areas, where both housing and neighborhood-level infrastructure are inadequate.

“When your home is also your workplace, the entire surrounding infrastructure starts to shape your ability to work,” explains Sinha. “Water shortages, power cuts, overflowing drains, or smoke from nearby dumpsites--none of these are just household inconveniences. They’re productivity setbacks, especially for women who already struggle with time poverty.”

For women juggling care responsibilities and irregular work orders, time spent fetching water or cleaning soot off surfaces eats directly into their paid hours. For instance, women lose up to two hours each day fetching water when it isn’t available within their homes. In peak summer months, what should have been a few hours of embroidery or packaging work often stretches late into the night--not by choice, but by constraint.

The unavailability of secure land titles adds yet another layer of precarity to their labour. With a significant number of home-based workers living on rent or without any legal contracts, this informal setting makes them more vulnerable to the threat of eviction. This constant threat also prevents women workers from making basic improvements to their homes that could ease their working conditions.

Gori Ben, who has lived in her jhuggi for over three decades, says she’s been saving up to replace her leaking roof for years--but hasn’t been able to do so. “They don’t let us put a single brick,” she says, referring to the local police and municipal authorities. “We don’t even have an electricity connection. And every few months, someone or the other is evicted from here. How do you work in such circumstances?”

Heat collides with care work

For home-based women workers, paid work is inseparable from unpaid duties, as the home doubles as both workplace and caregiving space. During summer months, when soaring temperatures shrink the number of productive work hours, these overlapping demands intensify.

According to the 2022 HomeNet South Asia study on home-based workers in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, over 83% of respondents reported a noticeable rise in summer temperatures over the past decade.

This change has had the most visible impact on women’s unpaid work, with nearly 46.5% of home-based workers (HBWs) indicating an increase in domestic responsibilities. Of them, almost 60% (56 respondents) said their work had increased by more than two hours daily. This increase was driven by the burden of caring for the ill, followed by the time and effort it took to fetch water and manage food stocks.

“Food has to be cooked and eaten immediately, or it spoils,” says Gori Ben, explaining how even basic routines get reshaped by the heat. Most women find the early parts of the day consumed by household chores and caregiving responsibilities, leaving only the sweltering afternoon or late night for income-generating work. As a result, tasks like embroidery, stitching, or packaging often get pushed into the night--not as a choice, but as a last resort.

The rising heat also brings with it heightened physical and mental stress. Paro says the combination of long working hours, soaring temperatures, and erratic sleep has begun taking a toll on her health. “You can’t sit for long in one place; the heat becomes unbearable. My back hurts, but if I stop working, there’s no money,” she says.

The toll is not limited to individual exhaustion. When family members fall sick due to heat exposure or lack of clean water, it is the women who shoulder the burden of caregiving--sacrificing their already limited work time. According to data from Homenet South Asia, around 15% of home-based workers reported cases of heatstroke in their families in recent years. Over 30% reported incidences of waterborne and vector-borne diseases, like diarrhoea or dengue, during the hotter months. These illnesses not only strain limited household resources but also lead to frequent interruptions in paid work.

Between irregular or non-existent electricity supply, scarce water, caregiving duties, and worsening health, heatwaves don’t just raise temperatures--they tighten the vice on women’s time, health, and productivity. Each added stressor chips away at their already fragile livelihood.

Beyond heat

The 2022 study on home based workers living in informal settlements in Bangladesh, Nepal and India by HomeNet South Asia highlights that, in addition to extreme heat, home-based workers reported losses due to heavy rainfall and flooding, with some unable to deliver or even complete work due to dampness and disruption of supply chains. The study also found that erratic monsoons not only delay production but also exacerbate respiratory and water-borne diseases in informal settlements, pushing women into debt traps as medical and care burdens rise.

With little to no access to social safety nets, most HBWs are ill-equipped to absorb such shocks. Their coping strategies are limited: cutting daily expenses, drawing from meagre savings, selling off household assets, or taking loans—often at exploitative interest rates. Adjusting existing work or taking on additional jobs has also become a common survival tactic.

Nearly half of the surveyed HBWs had to take drastic steps in response to climate stress. One in five relocated their homes, while others switched occupations entirely. About 12% were forced to do both. In the past five years, roughly 10% had to sell major assets. While not all of these changes stem directly from climate impacts, a significant share—about 30%—cited health emergencies triggered by diseases like dengue, cholera, typhoid, or malaria as the tipping point.

Additionally, despite their significant economic contribution, most home-based workers remain invisible in labour and urban planning frameworks. They are rarely factored into zoning regulations, climate action plans, or social protection schemes .​

Experts recommend a multi-pronged approach: formally recognising home-based workers in urban policy, improving access to basic services like water, waste management, and electricity, and integrating their needs into climate-resilient infrastructure plans. This includes designing zoning laws that don’t separate workspaces from homes, enabling safe retrofitting of houses, and ensuring climate adaptation funds reach informal settlements.​

IndiaSpend has sent queries to the office of Mansukh Mandaviya, the Union Minister for Labour and Employment, on whether the ministry is planning any targeted interventions to support home-based workers, particularly in the context of rising climate stress and informal urban employment. We will update this story when we receive a response.

Most critically, tenure security remains a missing piece in the puzzle. Without legal land rights, home-based workers face barriers in accessing government schemes for housing upgrades, water connections, or even solar rooftop subsidies.​

As Paro puts it, half-laughing and half-weary, "In the heat, you burn; when it rains, sewage floods the house. And on top of that, the wages are barely enough to survive. How is anyone supposed to keep working like this?"

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