In a crowded slum in India's western Gujarat state, workers rush to paint hundreds of tin roofs with white paint as the hottest time of year approaches.
The new makeover, which involves 400 households in the Gujarat's largest city of Ahmedabad, is being done as part of efforts to keep houses in the area cool under the increasingly hot temperatures of Gujarat's summer.
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The new makeover, which involves 400 households in the Gujarat's largest city of Ahmedabad, is being done as part of efforts to keep houses in the area cool under the increasingly hot temperatures of Gujarat's summer.
WATCH MORE: https://thestartv.com/c/news
SUBSCRIBE: https://cutt.ly/TheStar
LIKE: https://fb.com/TheStarOnline
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00:00In a crowded slum in India's western Gujarat state, workers rush to paint hundreds of tin
00:07roofs with white paint as the hottest time of year approaches.
00:11The new makeover, which involves 400 households in the Gujarat's largest city of Ahmedabad,
00:17is being done as part of efforts to keep houses in the area cool under the increasingly hot
00:22temperatures of Gujarat's summer.
00:24The effort is also tied to a global scientific trial to study how indoor heat impacts people's
00:30health and economic outcomes in developing countries and how cool roofs might ease the
00:36burden.
00:37We have an entire community and half of the community are assigned a cool roof and half
00:44are not.
00:46And then we want to track a whole range of outcomes, including health and indoor environment
00:52outcomes.
00:53And we want to know what the effect of reducing the indoor temperature is on these outcomes.
00:59By painting roofs with a white coating that contains highly reflective pigments such as
01:04titanium dioxide, Bunker and her team are sending more of the sun's radiation back
01:10to the atmosphere and preventing it from being absorbed.
01:14The crowded Vansara Vasa slum, which is composed of more than 2,000 mostly tiny, airless, one-room
01:21dwellings, was among the districts selected for the project.
01:25Local resident Suman Pravin Vansara, whose roof was painted white in mid-January, said
01:31she was already noticing a difference.
01:34We couldn't even stand up.
01:37Now that the color has been applied, it's cool at home.
01:41Before, we couldn't even sit on the roof.
01:44Now we can sit.
01:45Even if the fan doesn't work at night, it still works.
01:46Before the painting project, some of the residents selected for the study said they would cover
01:49their roofs with plastic sheets and spread grass on them to provide some relief from
01:54the unbearable heat.