For many Indian women today, the sari is more an outfit for rare, dressy occasions than utilitarian daily wear. Better the pre-stitched convenience of trousers or salwar kameezes than the fumbling that comes with six-yards of freeform fabric. Yet, a new study by a Riyadh-based researcher of Indian origin turns the idea on its head, showing that the Indian sari scores over western wear on at least one aspect of convenience – insulation. Much like a thermos flask, the sari has the ability to keep its wearer warm or cool, depending on the weather around her. It’s all in the pallu, the study shows. Depending on whether you pleat the pallu or drape it across your shoulders, you can alternate between the warmth of a sweater and trousers or the breeziness of a summer skirt and blouse.

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This finding was reported last month in the journal Architectural Science Review by a group of researchers from South Korea’s LG Electronics and University of California, Berkeley. Lead author Madhavi Indraganti, who is currently a professor at Prince Sultan University in Riyadh, studies thermal comfort – the perception of comfort which people experience when the temperature, their clothing and the air speed around them is just right. Indraganti’s work involves speaking to occupants of residential and commercial buildings to understand what contributes to their thermal comfort and then creating mathematical models to help building designers pick the most appropriate architecture for a climate. As Indraganti tells me in an interview on the phone, “Thermal comfort is the primordial reason behind human existence. If it wasn’t for thermal comfort, we wouldn’t be alive.”

We humans are fair-weather people: there is a very narrow band of temperatures in which we can survive. So we widen this band by wearing (and taking off) clothes and building houses, thus allowing us to live in inhospitable regions such as Antarctica and the Sahara. Even so, we don’t always manage to make conditions perfect for ourselves, and this, predictably, hurts our productivity. In a 2006 analysis of 26 previous studies on the relationship between workplace temperature and productivity, Finnish researchers found that the productivity rose with each degree Celsius upto the 20-23 degree band, peaked at 21.6 degrees, and then began dropping past 24 degrees.

Indraganti and her team have also been looking for data on the optimum temperature for productivity in India, but not much is available. India’s National Building code, a compulsory code of health and safety standards for buildings, borrows over two-decade old guidelines from ASHRAE, an international society that sets standards for building design. Apart from being obsolete, the ASHRAE 1992 standards borrowed by India also rely on studies conducted in western countries. This is a problem, because India has very diverse and unique climatic zones, with both Himalayan and desert conditions. Such diversity in climatic zones means that the temperature at which people experience thermal comfort varies from place to place in India, something not captured in the Indian building code.

The other problem is that ASHRAE 1992 standards assume that building occupants wear western clothes – business suits, skirts or trousers for women – something that doesn’t hold for the majority of Indian offices. “If you really follow these standards, it will be very detrimental to our environment given the power shortage we have,” says Indraganti. Designing buildings for the wrong temperature standards means they will be too cold or too hot, requiring enormous quantities of power to correct.

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