India remains a deeply unequal society, even as many headline indicators have improved. Wealth is highly concentrated: an Oxfam assessment reported that in 2017, about 73 percent of the wealth generated went to the richest 1 percent, while the poorest half of the population saw only around 1 percent of that increase.

Space cooling is emerging as one of the most critical fronts where India’s development trajectory and climate vulnerability intersect. Rising temperatures and more frequent, intense heatwaves are driving rapid growth in residential and commercial cooling demand; studies project that space cooling could account for around 45 percent of India’s peak electricity load by 2050 if current trends continue, up from about 10 percent in 2016.

The paper “Does social identity influence households’ adaptation to hot temperatures?” by Enrica De Cian, Filippo Pavanello, and Teresa Randazzo investigates how social identity—in this case proxied by caste—shapes household decisions to adapt to rising heat in India through the adoption of cooling technologies such as air conditioners and evaporative coolers.

The paper shows that social norms and peer effects within caste groups strongly influence whether households adopt cooling technologies, especially air conditioning. Households tend to align their behaviour with what is common in their own caste and district: when air-conditioner ownership among same-caste neighbours crosses a high threshold, individual adoption probabilities rise sharply, indicating that modern cooling can function as a visible, status-linked good that people copy to conform to group expectations.

Caste-based power relations in local areas further shape adaptation choices by reinforcing or relaxing identity-related barriers. In districts where upper castes are economically dominant, marginalized households are significantly less likely to adopt expensive technologies like air conditioning, consistent with an “oppression” mechanism in which discrimination, social pressure, and exclusion make visible upward moves more costly.

Unequal access to formal finance and savings instruments constitutes a third key mechanism limiting adaptation among marginalized castes. The analysis shows that lower-caste households are at least as likely, and often more likely, to borrow than upper castes, but they rely disproportionately on informal sources such as relatives and friends, while upper castes obtain more loans from banks and hold more formal savings in bank and post-office deposits.

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