On Call in a Burning City: How Extreme Heat Is Reshaping Women’s Platform Work in Delhi NCR

As Delhi’s summers grow longer, hotter, and more hazardous, women platform workers are being pushed to absorb the costs of extreme heat with little institutional protection. HeatWatch’s new report, On Call in a Burning City, shows that for women in beauty services, domestic work, food delivery, e-commerce, and ride-hailing, heat is not just a climate issue. It is a labour rights, gender, health, and urban infrastructure crisis.

Key Takeaways

• 71% of surveyed women worked all seven days of the week during summer.

• 65% had only one break or none during the working day.

• 86% self-reported at least one heat-related health challenge.

• 77% reported tiredness or weakness, 74% headaches, 63% dizziness, 57% dehydration or extreme thirst, 47% nausea or vomiting, and 36% fainting or feeling faint.

• 73% experienced these symptoms at least once or twice a week, including 40% who faced them every day.

• Only 18% sought treatment from a doctor, clinic, or hospital, which means 82% received no formal medical care.

• 69% reduced or stopped work because of heat-related illness.

• 71% reported a fall in income during summer.

• 89% reported borrowing, delaying payments, or cutting household expenditure to cope with summer-related financial pressure.

• 74% received no heatwave-related support from their platform.

Background

The report draws on consultations with researchers, practitioners, and worker representatives, a baseline survey of 26 women before peak summer, a focus group discussion with beauty-platform workers, and a summer survey of 100 women across Delhi-NCR. It captures heat exposure across the full working day, including travel between jobs, waiting for bookings, carrying equipment, and working inside customers’ homes where ventilation, water, cooling, and toilet access are uncertain.

The findings make clear that platform work is far less flexible than it appears. App-based systems of booking allocation, ratings, incentives, cancellation rules, and customer expectations restrict workers’ ability to slow down, take a break, reject a distant task, or stop when they feel unwell. Basic facilities are also frequently unavailable: 27% said clean drinking water was hardly ever or never available, 43% said the same for toilets, 48% for rest spaces, and 51% for shaded seating.

For women, these risks are compounded by gendered harms. Many workers must navigate unsafe waiting spaces, limited access to toilets, customer misbehaviour, unpaid care responsibilities, and mandatory synthetic or dark uniforms that worsen sweating, discomfort, and skin irritation. The report argues that women platform workers are falling between two incomplete systems: heat policy that lacks enforceability and occupation-specific accountability, and platform-worker regulation that does not recognise heat as an occupational hazard.

Recommendations

Governments should:

• Introduce a rebuttable presumption of employment for heat‑exposed platform workers

• Create a gender‑disaggregated, dynamic registry and spatial mapping of women platform workers under CoSS

• Recognise heat as an enforceable occupational hazard, monitored by wet‑bulb temperature

• Expand state‑run social security and insurance for platform workers and prepare the health system for heat illness

• Mandate algorithmic transparency with a gender lens and human oversight

• Make women platform workers visible in e‑Shram and welfare‑board governance

• Establish gender‑sensitive platform‑worker rest hubs through a PPP model

Platforms should: 

• Recognise employment‑like responsibilities for heat‑exposed platform workers

• Make gig allocation heat‑sensitive and end algorithmic pressure during heatwaves

• Guarantee at least two paid, penalty‑free breaks per shift, plus short cooling breaks

• Provide real heat protection and hydration beyond a cooling vest and water

• Roll back “service in minutes” promises and reduce algorithmic time pressure

Read the report here