Delhi in June is Basically a Furnace, And the Worst Part? We Did This to Ourselves

Photo by Ethan Sarkar from Pexels

It's June in Delhi. I stepped outside at 10 AM yesterday to grab some groceries and within four minutes, four minutes, I was sweating through my shirt, squinting into a white-hot sky, and genuinely questioning my life choices. The footpath felt like it was radiating heat from underground. There was no shade anywhere. Not a single tree in sight for the entire stretch of road. And that, honestly, is the real story here.

Where Did All the Trees Go?

I've lived in Delhi long enough to remember when this city had more green in it. Old photos of Delhi show wide, tree-lined roads, Neem, Peepal, Jamun, thick canopies that actually made walking outside bearable. Most of that is gone now. Every new flyover, every widened road, every new colony that came up in the last decade took trees with it. What replaced them? More concrete. More stone. More surfaces that absorb heat all day and release it all night, which is why even at 11 PM it still feels like 38°C outside. This city has turned into a heat trap, and we built the trap ourselves.

What 45°C Actually Feels Like When You Have No Cover

People who experience Delhi summers from inside air-conditioned offices or cars don't fully get it. But step outside, really outside, on foot, on the street, and the heat becomes something physical. It pushes against you. The hot wind that blows in June here, the loo, doesn't cool you down. It dries you out. I saw an elderly vegetable vendor sitting under a tiny torn tarp near my street yesterday, fanning himself with a newspaper. No tree nearby. No shade structure. Just him and the sun. That image hasn't left me. We talk about climate change in big global terms, but this is what it looks like at the street level in Delhi in June 2026.

☀️ Hard truth: An AC doesn't solve a heat problem, it moves heat outside while making your room bearable. Every AC running in Delhi is making the streets even hotter. We're cooling our rooms and roasting our city at the same time.

It Doesn't Need a Grand Solution, Just Some Shade

I'm not an urban planner. But even I can see that the simplest fix is the oldest one, trees. Not saplings that die in two summers because nobody waters them. Actual grown, maintained, protected trees planted along every road and footpath. Some colonies in South Delhi still have them and the temperature difference is noticeable the moment you walk under that canopy. It's not magic. It's just nature doing what it has always done, if we let it. Delhi needs a serious, committed urban greening push. Not a photo-op plantation drive in July that gets forgotten by August. Something real and long-term. Until then, I'll be the guy stepping out at 6 AM to avoid the worst of it, carrying a water bottle everywhere, and quietly resenting every unnecessarily wide treeless road I have to cross.
So, how are you surviving this heat? And do you think your city has gotten visibly hotter over the years? Tell me honestly.

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