I, Saumya Verma, grew up in Noida. The Noida of my childhood was sparse: wide roads, open land, dust and possibility in equal measure. It was not beautiful, but it breathed. Today, that same Noida is a concrete grid. On a May afternoon, stepping outside feels less like walking into summer and more like opening an oven door. We did not lose our climate to bad luck. We surrendered it to bad policy.

There is an old Glucon-D advertisement that has stayed with many of us: a cartoon sun bending down over a child, inserting a straw into the top of the child's head and gleefully sucking out their energy. It was meant to sell an electrolyte drink. It was also, as it turns out, a documentary. That advertisement is no longer a metaphor, it is a medical reality playing out across India's cities every summer, except the child in question is not a cartoon, the sun has no straw, and there is no Glucon-D large enough to fix what we have built.

The Numbers That Should Shame a Nation

India is on fire, not metaphorically, but literally, measurably, catastrophically. Data released by website AQI.in on April 21, 2026 confirmed that 19 of the world's 20 hottest locations were inside India's borders, and 95 of the world's 100 hottest cities are Indian cities. Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh are baking at temperatures above 43–45°C. The IMD has warned that heatwave conditions will persist and worsen through April and May 2026. This is not a season. It is a sentence and we wrote it ourselves.

The Cities We Unmade

There is a version of Delhi that old-timers remember and younger generations have never known. In the 1960s and 70s, the city was dense with neem, peepal, jamun, and gulmohar trees. Chanakyapuri, Lodi Road, and Civil Lines were essentially forests with roads running through them. Then we began erasing it. A peer-reviewed study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research (2025) found that Delhi witnessed a 50% expansion in built-up area over 47 years, while vegetation cover declined by approximately 60%. The result: the same study found Delhi recorded a rise of 5°C in average temperature between 1990 and 2022 alone, with peak surface temperatures hitting 51.60°C.

The Delhi Metro removed over 50,000 trees during its construction. Pragati Maidan redevelopment felled nearly 2,000 mature neem and peepal trees. Each time, saplings were promised. Each time, temperatures climbed. And the Delhi–Dehradun Expressway, marketed as the “Samridhi ka Highway”, resulted in samadhi of 45,000 trees in Uttarakhand alone. Of the trees “translocated” in Uttar Pradesh, only 121 of 155 survived. You cannot compensate a sixty-year-old peepal with a two-foot sapling in a plastic bag. The sapling will take four decades to do what the original tree did yesterday. The temperature, meanwhile, does not wait.

What Science Has Known for Years

The science is unambiguous. Concrete can hold roughly 2,000 times as much heat as an equivalent volume of air. Urban surfaces absorb solar radiation throughout the day and release it slowly at night, creating cities that never truly cool. Research published in ScienceDirect (2025) found brick structures have a normalised heat index 51% higher than granite, releasing significantly more heat into the surrounding atmosphere. The Rocky Mountain Institute's 2026 analysis of Delhi found that nighttime temperatures in built-up areas were 20°C hotter than surrounding agricultural and forest lands during a May heatwave. Twenty degrees. At night. That is the price of concrete.

And who pays it? Not the people in air-conditioned offices commissioning the highways. The poor pay it. The elderly pay it. Children pay it, not beneath a peepal tree in the shade, as Sudhir Mishra once did, but on a sun-baked concrete floor in a tenement with no cross-ventilation and no trees for a kilometre in any direction.

One does not need satellite data to understand what has happened to South Extension, Defence Colony, or Karol Bagh. A walk through these neighbourhoods, once quiet, tree-lined residential colonies with generous setbacks, open courtyards, and homes that breathed, tells the story plainly. Every second plot has a crane above it or a freshly poured concrete slab waiting for the next floor. Basement excavations go deeper, buildings climb higher, the mandatory green space on paper vanishes the moment the inspector leaves, and what were designated residential zones have quietly surrendered to commercials like shops, showrooms, and offices wedged into every ground floor, every corner plot, every bylane. The result is not a residential colony anymore but it is a heat trap, a canyon of concrete where heat enters freely, bounces between walls, and has nowhere to escape. There are no trees old enough to cast meaningful shade because no tree survives long enough between one construction cycle and the next. These neighbourhoods do not cool at night. They smoulder. And the families living in them, many of whom have been there for generations, find themselves trapped inside a heat sink that they themselves created and the law permitted, plot by plot, floor by floor, commercial by commercial, until the colony they grew up in became unrecognisable and unliveable.

When Even the Supreme Court Bows to a Banyan

In the middle of this national catastrophe, there is one story of extraordinary sanity. In January 2025, the Delhi High Court issued notice on an Intervention Application filed by Central Public Works Department (CPWD), Supreme Court Division, through Advocate Sudhir Mishra, concerning the transplantation of trees within the Supreme Court complex as part of its expansion project. Rather than simply transplanting the 61 trees that fell within construction lines, the number was painstakingly reduced to 26. Thirty-five trees were preserved in place. And one ancient Banyan tree, with a girth of 675 cm, almost certainly over a century old, was saved by redesigning the entire basement layout around it. The ramp placement was changed. The internal road was redesigned. An entire construction blueprint was redrawn around the life of one Banyan.

Let that sink in. The Supreme Court of India redesigned its own building to spare a single tree. Meanwhile, 45,000 trees were felled for a highway. The contrast is not irony. It is indictment. If a Banyan tree can stop a construction blueprint at the Supreme Court of India, it can stop one anywhere, provided there is the will, and a legal framework that forces planners to exhaust every alternative before reaching for the chainsaw.

The Middle East Question

Every conversation about India's heat produces someone asking: “But what about the Middle East? Dubai has no trees and it isn't this bad.” The comparison deserves an honest answer. Research analysed by Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, found that Dubai and Abu Dhabi actually exhibit a daytime Urban Cool Island effect, the city centre is cooler than the surrounding desert by 4–6°C during the day. Glass skyscrapers reflect rather than absorb solar radiation, the city's layout incorporates wind corridors, and both cities have been aggressively expanding green cover and water bodies. The surrounding barren desert heats and cools rapidly, making the built city relatively cooler by comparison. There is also a climatic factor specific to 2026: a U-shaped jet stream has trapped a high-pressure heat dome over the Indian subcontinent while pulling cooler Mediterranean air into the Middle East. But that is weather. The urban heat island is not weather. It is permanent. It is policy.

What the Law Must Now Do

As lawyers, we do not write this merely as a lament. We write it as a brief. Article 21's right to life has been expansively interpreted to include the right to a healthy environment [MC Mehta v. Union of India (Taj Trapezium Zone case) Supreme Court, 2025 and Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, 1991]. The public trust doctrine holds that natural resources including urban green cover cannot be alienated for infrastructural gain without genuine public benefit and genuine mitigation. The constitutional architecture already exists. What is needed now is the will to use it.

First, the Supreme Court must mandate a binding Green Infrastructure Ratio for every infrastructure project. No highway, metro line, or urban redevelopment that results in a net loss of mature tree cover should receive environmental clearance. Compensatory afforestation must be satellite-verified and survival-confirmed before construction begins, not promised on paper and forgotten at inauguration.

Second, every Smart City project must carry a legally enforceable minimum green canopy cover of 33%, verified through remote sensing data.

Third, transplantation survival data must be placed before an independent judicial monitor, with agencies that report success without longitudinal data facing contempt proceedings.

Fourth, Parliament must amend the Environment Protection Act to include Urban Heat Island mitigation as a mandatory component of Environmental Impact Assessments.

The peepal tree under which Sudhir Mishra once sat learning to read in class 9^th, at Siwan, Bihar, still survives. However, the so-called urbanisation and development is leading to creation of massive heat traps which is unheard in the history across the world. With every tree felled for a flyover, every neem canopy replaced by a concrete median, every 45,000 trees traded for 2.5 hours of highway time, the country built its own oven and then climbed inside.

Authors; 

Mr. Sudhir Mishra, Managing Partner, Trust Legal

Ms. Saumya Verma, Associate, Trust Legal. Views are personal.