Delhi · June · made for heat NGOs, unions and newsrooms
Forty-Six Degrees
You are Ramesh, a food-delivery rider, on a 46 °C day in Delhi. You need ₹650 by night: scooter rental, rent, money home. Every hour from 7 am to 9 pm you choose: ride, stop and drink, or find shade. Ramesh is a composite character; the day is built from the sources below.
The math
We ran every permitted sequence of choices, 3 choices across 15 hours, 315 = 14,348,907 days, through the same model the player uses (model v4, September 2026). These are calculated results under the model's stated assumptions, not measurements of real riders. The complete model and the enumeration are one file, model.js (5 KB, plain JavaScript); node model.js reproduces every number in this table in about three seconds. Read the constants and formulas.
| Best possible day if Ramesh… | Earns |
|---|---|
| never leaves the coping zone | ₹433 |
| never reaches heat exhaustion | ₹509 |
| What he needs today | ₹650 |
| earns the most of any day, and it runs through heat exhaustion | ₹681 |
In the model, every rupee past ₹509 has to come out of his body. No schedule reaches ₹650 without entering the exhaustion zone. How the model works and what it can't tell you.
What it's based on
Reported facts, with sources:
- ₹500 a day is what one Delhi rider said he earned during the 2024 heat wave, down from ₹750 in winter; others reported ₹500–650 for 10-hour shifts. Al Jazeera, June 2024
- 30 minutes of break in a day, for a rider doing 30–35 orders across 14–15 hours at 45 °C and above. Business Standard, 2026
- 12 million gig workers in India in FY25, projected to reach 23.5 million by 2029–30. Business Standard, 2026
- 247 billion potential labour hours lost to heat in India in 2024, about 420 per person. Lancet Countdown 2025, via Outlook Business
- 3,400 estimated excess deaths across India on a single extremely hot day. Frontiers in Environmental Health study, via Euronews, June 2026
Illustrative, set so a full day lands in the ₹500–750 range riders report: per-order pay (₹22), the midday boost (+₹15 per order), the 28-order bonus (₹150), fuel (₹15 an hour), the temperature curve, and every coefficient in the body-heat score. The body-heat score is simplified for play and is not a medical or WBGT model.
Who asked for it
Nobody. It is the first Borrowed Days story, built in September 2026 to show the format, and offered free to heat NGOs, gig-worker unions and newsrooms.
What changed
Outcomes have not yet been measured. In its first week the story was shared on LinkedIn, itch.io, YouTube and Instagram and reached roughly 1,250 people on LinkedIn alone; it opened a pilot conversation with a heat-research organisation. Play counts will be published here once analytics are in place.