Whatever you picked, hold that number.

On June 17, 2025, Sunil Kumar Singh collapsed on the factory floor in Noida's industrial area.

The 50-year-old metal worker from Etawah had been working his usual shift when his body gave out.

By the time his son Aman reached Safdarjung Hospital, Singh's fever had spiked to 106°F.

The doctors wrapped ice packs around his chest. His face disappeared behind tubes while Aman waited by his side, watching his father fight for his life.

Singh had no employment contract and no cooling infrastructure at his workplace.

When I read this, one question kept coming back: who actually paid for Singh's collapse?

His family lost one source of income and Aman had to take days off work to be by his side. While Safdarjung Hospital absorbed the emergency costs.

None of this appears in our economic data. And Singh's case isn't isolated.

That number in the poll: the real answer is ₹18L crore.

We are experiencing one of the largest wealth transfers in Indian history, and are not measuring it.

The answer to why goes back to 1920s Britain.

When factories started polluting rivers in industrial Britain, economists noticed that the factory owners didn't pay for the damage.

The fishermen downstream who lost their catch did.

That cost was external to the factory's calculations, real and measurable, but assigned to whoever had the least power to refuse it.

India's summer heat is the same mechanism, operating at a scale Pigou never imagined.

The cost of working in extreme heat keeps getting assigned to whoever can't push it back.

Last Tuesday, I took a cab to a meeting in Cyber City. At 1:30 PM, construction barriers forced me to walk the last stretch in full sun.

By the time I reached the lobby, my shirt was soaked through. The security guard handed me water and I stood there for ten minutes cooling down.

A few hundred metres away, construction workers were pouring concrete with no shade. They had been there since morning, sharing one water cooler between thirty people.

I couldn't handle a short walk while they had been in it since morning.

Standing in that lobby, something became clear: every building I work in required someone to stand in that heat.

When I commission a project, contractors compete on price, as the easiest cost to cut is worker protection: shade, cooling breaks, water supply.

The contractor who cuts those costs wins the bid.

And the cost gets transferred to the worker's body, so I get the office, the contractor gets the margin, and the workers absorb the difference.

This is happening across every sector that touches heat.

Agriculture absorbed 66% of India's lost labour hours in 2024. Construction took 20%.

But when output drops, farmers say "bad monsoon." Construction supervisors say workers are slow.

The heat goes unmentioned because no one is measuring it against output, so no one has to name it as a cause.

Research on 3,000 workers in South India found that informal sector workers are 17 times more likely to experience heat-related productivity loss than formal employees exposed to the same temperatures.

Formal workers have cooling, paid breaks, and wage protection built into their working conditions. Informal workers absorb the entire externality with their bodies.

Same heat, same hours, completely different cost exposure, because one group has the conditions to push back and the other does not.

Women carry even more of it.

Agricultural women in Dharashiv district survive on 1 litre of water for entire workdays because local water is saline.

The result is a high incidence of kidney stones across the region i.e. the accumulated cost of years of heat exposure absorbed by people with nowhere to pass it on.

None of this appears in India's national accounts.

We don't record heat-adjusted labour input, and don't track heat-disrupted school days or count heat-attributed health expenditures.

This invisibility runs all the way into the death data.

Official figures show 269 heatstroke deaths in 2024 while Heat Watch counted 733.

The gap exists because Singh's record will say heart failure instead of heatstroke.

A study found heatstroke should account for 20 to 30% of heat-adjacent deaths. India recorded 40,000+ suspected cases but only 110 confirmed deaths.

When costs are invisible, the explanation for them shifts elsewhere.

Factory owners blame low output on lazy workers, and workers assume they are failing.

The heat cost gets diffused across a dozen plausible-sounding explanations, and the market failure continues because no one is required to account for it.

Pigou understood this in 1920: if you can't measure the externality, you cannot correct the market failure.

After that day in Cyber City, I started paying attention to things I had subconsciously ignored for years.

I started asking the delivery person who brings lunch to my office in 43°C heat whether they get breaks or water, as most don't.

When I needed electrical work done at home, the contractor quoted ₹15,000 for a full day. I told him nothing between noon and 3 PM, and that it would cost ₹17,000.

He looked at me like I had made an error. "Sir, same work, why more cost?"

"Because you're paying for afternoon breaks."

He didn't take the job.

I couldn't fix that. But I stopped pretending the cost didn't exist, because the whole system runs on the assumption that whoever is commissioning the work won't ask.

Some of this is moving at the policy level.

Delhi's Lieutenant Governor mandated water, shade, and paid noon breaks in May 2024. Singh's factory had none of it.

Part of the fix is measurement.

If the Economic Survey published a Heat Ledger i.e. lost labour hours, disrupted school days, hospital costs, state by state, these costs would stop being invisible.

And visible costs can be priced.

India spent $58 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2022.

A fraction of that reallocated to cool roofs, worker shelters, and urban shade infrastructure would correct a market failure where workers have spent decades subsidising profits with their health.

Sunil Kumar Singh's body, wrapped in ice packs in a Safdarjung Hospital bed, is what an uncorrected market failure looks like.

The cost of his collapse was legit, just assigned to the people who had no way to refuse it.

Until we measure it, the bill keeps getting paid, just not by the people who commissioned the work.

Hit reply and tell me: how many outdoor worker hours does your lifestyle require each summer? Have you ever counted what someone else is paying?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. The externality only shrinks when enough people see it. Forward this to someone who works outdoors or manages people who do.