The Boiling City: How Dhaka’s Informal Workforce is Being Drowned by Invisible Heat

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As the afternoon sun hammers down on Dhaka’s sprawling Tejgaon neighborhood, the asphalt radiates a blistering, suffocating fury. In a narrow, tin-roofed room that acts less like a home and more like a domestic pressure cooker, Samiha Begum gathers her school-aged children and flees to the shade of Hatirjheel Lake.

“The room starts heating up as soon as the sun rises,” Samiha says, the despair of survival etching deep lines into her face. “Even if it rains in the morning, the heat becomes like a boiler once the sun comes out. My children cannot stay inside... Here, the air is cooler than in my house.”

For Samiha, and millions of others driving the beating heart of Bangladesh’s capital, extreme heat is no longer a fleeting seasonal discomfort. It is an escalating, multi-pronged catastrophe creeping into their homes, eroding their health, and quietly devouring their livelihoods.

A Crucible of Climate Change

Bangladesh stands on the frontline of a planetary crisis, and its mega-city capital is bearing the brunt. According to recent data, the country’s maximum temperature has climbed by 1.1°C since 1980, but the true agony lies in the “feels-like” index—which has surged by a staggering 4.5°C. In Dhaka, the heat index routinely spikes 65% higher than the national average, transforming the world’s second-largest city of 37 million people into an urban furnace.

Meteorologists warn that the nature of the heat has fundamentally warped. It is no longer confined to the scorching depths of summer; it now bleeds dangerously into the monsoon season. Intense, erratic cloudbursts end abruptly within hours, leaving behind a merciless sunshine that locks humidity into the atmosphere, creating a suffocating greenhouse effect.

Nowhere is this felt more acutely than in Dhaka’s sprawling informal settlements. Home to an estimated 4 to 5 million people, these neighborhoods are packed with cramped, poorly ventilated tin-roofed rooms that trap heat long after dark.

The Economy of Exhaustion

The human toll of this thermal siege is inextricably tied to an economic crisis. A landmark study by People’s Courage International (PCI) into informal workers across South and Southeast Asia reveals that 74% of surveyed migrants in Dhaka report direct, severe negative impacts from rising temperatures, while 100% report suffering from extreme weather events.

Bangladesh’s informal economy employs roughly 85% of its entire national workforce—nearly 60 million people. When heat strikes, it strikes the pillars holding the nation’s economy upright. In 2024 alone, heat-related health impacts and productivity losses stripped the country of 250 million workdays, costing a staggering $1.78 billion—about 0.4% of the nation’s GDP. Dhaka recorded the worst productivity losses of any surveyed city, a grim testament to its heavy reliance on outdoor labor, grueling manual factories, and a complete absence of cooling infrastructure.

Consider the daily grind of Tayeb Ali, a rickshaw puller living in the Rayerbazar slum. To earn a living, he must manually push a heavy passenger cart through streets that feel like open ovens.

“Ten minutes of running rickshaw means twenty minutes of rest. I get exhausted quickly,” Tayeb confesses, his body buckling under the strain.

Even when the sun goes down, relief refuses to come. Researchers call it a “recovery deficit.” Workers spend all day marinating in blistering heat, only to return to homes that act as thermal reservoirs at night. Tayeb runs multiple electric fans in his cramped room, yet sleep remains an elusive luxury. Chronically sleep-deprived and physically depleted, he wakes up late the next morning, cutting his hours short and trapping his family deeper in a cycle of poverty and debt.

The Health Toll of the Invisible Crisis

Beneath the lost wages lies a silent health epidemic. The PCI study highlights that among Dhaka’s urban migrants, 71% face heat-linked physical ailments, 69% grapple with food insecurity, and 66% struggle just to access clean water and sanitation.

Prolonged thermal exposure triggers a cascade of physiological collapses: dehydration, heatstroke, cardiovascular strain, severe exhaustion, and creeping kidney disease. Yet, for Dhaka's informal workers, missing a day of work means missing a meal. Mothers like Hamida Begum in the Mirpur area watch helplessly as their children fall sick over and over again. “They sweat all day and become ill more often than before,” she says.

Between 2001 and 2022, Dhaka recorded 35 separate heatwave events—a frequency and duration that is only accelerating as urban heat islands expand across the concrete expanse.

A Race Against Time

The warnings from experts are stark and unyielding. Mitigating this crisis demands an immediate, radical pivot in urban planning: aggressive urban greening, massive investments in climate-resilient housing for the urban poor, upgraded public health networks, and robust early-warning systems.

For now, however, millions of workers in Dhaka wake up each morning facing a cruel binary choice: brave the blistering elements to earn a meager crust, or stay home and watch their families starve. As the climate clock ticks forward, the city's informal workforce remains trapped in the crosshairs of a warming world—struggling not just to progress, but simply to survive the day.