I'd want to see cites for that, honestly. Obviously India's commerce centers can't come close to handling a billion shoppers, but there's enough floor space in the urban core of Bangalore to house the at-risk population for a 72 hour heat wave.

The point is emergency management here. And I'd bet anything that somewhere there's a workable plan drawn up for exactly this kind of occurrence.

India's total retail space is 2 sq ft/person[1]. That's not enough space for someone to sleep in, even assuming that 100% of the retail space there is air conditioned (it's not) and assuming that the AC systems can keep up with that much body heat in temperatures that high (they can't).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retailing_in_India#The_Indian_...

>The point is emergency management here. And I'd bet anything that somewhere there's a workable plan drawn up for exactly this kind of occurrence.

Aside from ACs having a limit on cooling far below “everyone packed in a building”, if you’ve ever done business in India, I don’t see how one could assume there would be a plan drawn up for this grand of a scenario, much less many smaller scale scenarios.

> there's enough floor space in the urban core of Bangalore

There's vastly more to India than a few metro cities. A quick google search reveals that around 65+ % of Indian population lives in rural areas.

India is in for some very dark times if the climate situation gets worse. The positive lining in the cloud is that we have some measure of political stability for the next 5 years.