From Here to Humidity

Once famed for its seasons, Pune now has only two: hot and hellishly humid.

In 1969, The Beatles released ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ a lilting ode to warmth and renewal after “a long, cold, lonely winter.” For millions in Britain and the broader Anglosphere, the song captures the near-spiritual joy that accompanies the first rays of spring sunshine after months of gloom. To be British is, in part, to revere the sun as a guest who is fleeting, temperate and always welcome.

Today, in India, especially in Pune, that metaphor has curdled into something altogether more menacing. The sun no longer arrives as gentle deliverance but barges in like a houseguest who won’t leave, turns up the thermostat and unplugs the fan. Once famed for its moderate climate and four distinct seasons, Pune now finds itself baking under unrelenting heat, with humidity levels more appropriate for coastal cities than this inland plateau. The ‘Queen of the Deccan,’ perched on the leeward side of the Western Ghats, has become a pressure cooker - and nobody’s singing about it.

Its residents boasted of four well-behaved seasons and temperatures that gently dropped at night, permitting woollen shawls and steaming chai. That era is now relegated to nostalgia. In its place we have a relentless, humid inferno that stretches for nearly ten months of the year, culminating in brief, erratic interludes of rain or respite. Welcome to the new Pune, where summer files a restraining order against winter.

In recent weeks, mercury levels have breached 42°C, a threshold once deemed an aberration but now increasingly routine. Worse, the city has added a new meteorological torture to its arsenal: humidity.

In a place known for its dry heat, residents now suffer through 33°C that feels like 38°C. The numbers may seem minor, but the lived experience is punishing. Clothes cling. Tempers flare. Electricity bills soar. And all of this, it turns out, is a result not of planetary misfortune but of civic greed and ecological amnesia.

The science behind Pune’s descent into sweat-stained misery is straightforward and unflattering. Experts cite the ‘urban heat island effect,’ where concrete and asphalt trap heat like a pressure cooker lid as a leading cause.

The city’s rampant greyscaping has displaced its once-lush green and blue patches with glassy high-rises and manicured lawns. Rainfall, when it arrives, does so in torrential spurts, flooding the soil and saturating the air with evaporative moisture. The result is a city that is hot, humid and increasingly uninhabitable for parts of the year.

Microclimate studies show stark disparities even within the city. Affluent neighbourhoods like Koregaon Park enjoy leafy canopies and cooler microclimates, while densely built areas like Shivajinagar suffer the brunt of thermal intensification. Looming over all of this is the spectre of climate change which amplifies every local vulnerability.

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) insists on seasonal normalcy, but reality keeps jumping the gun. This year’s monsoon, it predicts, will bring above-normal rainfall. But if recent trends are any guide, Punekars are likely to broil in humidity long before the first raindrops fall. Already, the monsoon has ‘unofficially’ hit Kerala earlier than expected, a sign that the atmosphere is no longer consulting bureaucratic calendars. In Pune, where the rains once arrived like clockwork in mid-June, their onset now fluctuates wildly, sometimes teasing in May, sometimes ghosting into July.

The consequences extend beyond mere discomfort. Prolonged heatwaves and unstable rain patterns threaten agriculture in the surrounding regions, stress water resources and strain public health infrastructure.

Worst of all, winter, which was once Pune’s pride, is now a cameo season. Where the city once enjoyed a crisp three-month interlude of cool air and clear skies, it now receives little more than a shrug. Climate data suggests that Pune is becoming a two-season city: ‘Hot’ and ‘Hotter with Humidity.’ It is a calendar with only two unbearable pages, both borrowed from Mumbai’s climatic misery.

Solutions exist, but they are inconvenient. Restoring urban green spaces, implementing sustainable construction codes, encouraging rainwater harvesting and taxing excessive concretisation would all help reverse the thermal tide. These obviously require political will and public patience, something even scarcer than shade in the summer.

In the meantime, Pune must accept a new identity: no longer regal and temperate, but flushed and feverish, its crown swapped for a sweatband.

(The writer is an independent journalist with a keen interest in environmental issues and urban ecology. Views personal)