As the temperature rose to 42 degrees in June 2024, Ahmedabad had been bearing the brunt of the heat. “Since our house is at the corner of the slum where it gets particularly warm, we did not know how to cool it down,” says Radha, a resident of Ignas Park slum.

Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) responded to the heat issue of Ahmedabad’s slums with a simple solution — painting roofs with solar-reflective white paint so as to cool the indoors. “It used to be unbearably hot, but now, it feels much more comfortable,” adds Radha.

If you now look at the roofs of most of these homes in the slums of Ahmedabad from a bird’s eye view, you will find them all painted in solar reflective white paint to cool the indoors.

The project started as a pilot in 2016 when the Mahila Housing Trust was looking into cheaper and innovative ways of reducing heat. The Trust saw that homes lacked good airflow due to shared walls and kitchens in the same rooms, making the homes hotter.

To reduce the heat, people used to run fans and coolers the entire day at full speed, increasing their electricity bill. This made the Trust realise that they needed a heat action plan.

The UV reflective paint not only brings down the temperature but also reduces electricity bills due to lesser usage. It reduced the temperature by five to six degrees inside homes.

Calling it the cool roof technology, Bhavna Maheriya, MHT’s programme manager, says, “The best thing about this initiative was that the application was very easy. The women could easily source it from us and apply it.”

“When there are structural changes in the homes of slum dwellers, we give them a 100 percent guarantee that if the technology does not suit them, we will reverse all the changes made to the house,” she adds.

Currently, over 20,000 slum homes in Ahmedabad have benefitted from the organisation’s initiative. The trust depends on funds and contributions to continue helping the people living in slums.