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.
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