India, June 5 -- There are nights now when the heat does not end with sunset.

You step outside and instead of relief, a hot gust meets you--air that feels as if the day itself is still being exhaled back by the city. Walls remain warm. Roads continue to radiate. Rooftops refuse to release stored heat. Sleep becomes negotiation, not recovery.

India is no longer simply getting hotter. It is losing the ability to cool down.

And into this reality, air-conditioners switch on almost reflexively.

Yet an uncomfortable question now defines India's summer: What if we are treating a heat problem as an electricity problem?

On recent peak days, global temperature maps showed an unusual pattern--95 to 98 of the world's 100 hottest cities were in I...