Working in the heat: Mumbai’s street vendors and a health risk that goes unnamed

-  Published for World Environment Day, 5 June 2026

By late morning in M-East Ward, the heat has already settled over the lanes for the day. There is little shade to retreat into and few trees to soften the glare. Along these streets, women and men sit beside their vegetables, fruit, clothes and cooked food, as they will for the next eight or ten hours. They cannot move indoors when the sun is at its worst, because the street is where their livelihood is. For them, summer is not a season to wait out. It is a workplace.

M-East Ward is one of the most thermally hostile parts of Mumbai. It carries little green cover, sits beside the Deonar dumping ground and is dense with surfaces that hold and radiate heat. For residents who can step inside during the hottest hours, this is uncomfortable. For street vendors, whose work is the open road itself, the heat is a daily occupational reality with no off switch.

This World Environment Day, as cities reckon with rising urban heat, it is worth pausing on the people who absorb that heat on everyone else's behalf. Over April and May 2026, we spent time with forty street vendors in M-East Ward, listening to how heat shapes their working days. It is a small group and their stories are not meant to stand in for every vendor in the city. But what they described was strikingly consistent and it points to something the wider conversation on urban heat has tended to miss.

A condition with no name

Every vendor we spoke with described living with the effects of heat through the summer. Weakness and fatigue were almost universal. Many spoke of muscle cramps, heavy sweating, dizziness, headaches; some described moments of feeling faint at their stalls. For most, these were not occasional bad days but a near-daily feature of the working season.

What stayed with us most was not the symptoms themselves but the silence around them. Nearly all the vendors had never heard the term "heat stroke”. They were living with the signs of a serious, sometimes dangerous condition that, in their world, had no name. It is hard to seek help for something you have no words for. This is what an invisible health burden looks like up close: not absent, simply unnamed and uncounted.

The water they choose not to drink

One pattern stood out, because it is both easy to miss and entirely possible to fix.

Most vendors have no toilet near where they work. Faced with that, many make a quiet, rational decision: they drink less water through the day, so that they will not need one. It is a sensible response to a practical problem. It is also, in the heat, a risky one. Drinking less during the hottest hours leaves the body less able to cope with the temperature and tips people toward the very exhaustion and illness they are trying to get through the day without.

A toilet and a drinking-water point near a vending zone are not luxuries; they are among the simplest things that would let vendors hydrate safely while they work. Provisions like these are already envisaged for vending areas in existing law {Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014}. Seen through a climate-and-health lens, they become something more than sanitation: they are a quiet but direct way to reduce heat illness.

Rest and care that feel out of reach

It would be easy to look at how rarely vendors rest or seek care and read it as carelessness. Spending time with them suggests something gentler and more difficult: many simply cannot afford to stop.

A large share are the main earners for their families. Stepping away from the stall on a hot day, or taking a day off when unwell, often means income that cannot be recovered, and frequently there is no one else to watch the goods. So, people keep working through symptoms, not out of indifference to their health, but because the day's earnings are not optional.

The same pressures shape whether they seek care. Almost all the vendors work within a short walk of a clinic, and the handful who did go for a heat-related complaint were seen the same day. Distance and availability were not the obstacles. What kept people away was the cost of leaving the stall and the hours it might take. The care exists and is close at hand; the difficulty lies in the everyday economics of reaching it. There is also a quieter gap in awareness, half the vendors had not heard of the free public Apla Dawakhana clinic nearby, and tended instead toward closer private providers.

A group that is ready to be reached

Perhaps the most hopeful thing we heard concerns heat-health information.

None of the vendors recalled receiving any guidance about heat and health from a formal source: not from a health worker, a municipal announcement or the media. Yet this was not for lack of interest. When asked what they would trust, most named in-person conversation from an ASHA or ANM as their most reliable source. 

That is an encouraging place to start. The trust is there. The preferred channel is there. What remains is to bring the two together.

Where vendors actually turn

There is one more thing vendors told us that matters for anyone thinking about how heat support reaches them. When they do seek care, many go to the small private clinics close to their stalls rather than to public facilities further away. For a sizeable share of vendors, a local private practitioner is the real first point of contact.

That points to a practical opportunity. Efforts to prepare the health system for heat naturally focus on public services, but the providers vendors visit most often sit outside that circle. Including local private practitioners by sharing simple guidance and supplies with them ahead of summer would meet vendors where they already go and extend the reach of heat preparedness without building anything new.

What vendors told us

Activation, not invention

The most encouraging conclusion is that very little of this calls for something new. Clinics exist and are close. Frontline health workers are present in these communities. The frameworks meant to protect outdoor workers from heat and the provisions meant to support vending zones, are already in place. What the vendors' experience highlights is the space between these systems and the people they are meant to reach. To close that distance, a few practical, partnership-minded steps would go a long way:

1. Recognise street vendors as a heat-vulnerable group within the city's heat planning, so that a population currently between the lines becomes part of the picture.
2. Bring water and toilets to vending zones, drawing on provisions that already exist and treat them as climate-health measures, because that is what they are.
3. Connect frontline health workers with vendors ahead of summer, with simple materials and a few visits to vending sites, building on the in-person channel vendors already trust.
4. Begin recording heat-related illness at local clinics during the hot season, so that a burden which is real but currently uncounted starts to become visible to those who plan for it.
5. Include local private practitioners in heat preparedness, since they are where many vendors actually turn for care.

On World Environment Day, it is easy to talk about heat in the abstract: records, projections, degrees. The more useful story is about who carries that heat for the rest of us, and how we reach them. In M-East Ward, that is a group of vendors who work through the hottest hours with few alternatives and little to shield them and who, with support, are very much within reach.

This piece draws on conversations with forty street vendors in M-East Ward, Mumbai, during April-May 2026, led by Dr. Anagha Devarajan, MPH student, TISS in collaboration with SNEHA’s Research team.