Let’s start with two numbers—48.2°C in Banda, Uttar Pradesh and 46.5°C in Sirpur, Telangana. Nearly 850 km apart, but bound by brutal, extreme heat. In Bundelkhand, hot winds blowing in from Pakistan’s Balochistan and the Thar Desert turned Banda into India’s hottest city for four days, with the temperatures edging towards 50°C on cracked black-cotton soil with barely a tree in sight. In Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, over 40 heatstroke-related deaths were reported over just two days.
This is not a story about two states or one season. It is a national emergency running from the Himalayas to the shoreline. And it has been building for years.
The India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) seasonal outlook for April-June 2026 warned us plainly: above-normal heatwave days were coming for east, central, northwest India, and the southeast of the peninsula. Red and orange alerts were flying across Telangana before summer officially began. The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, which has been tracking this for decades, said heatwave frequency in India’s core zone has risen by 2.5 days every decade since 1961, and the trend is getting steeper.
This year, there’s a double blow. While long-term warming has raised India’s temperature floor year after year, a super El Niño is developing this year in the equatorial Pacific, a phenomenon that has historically made Indian summers worse. It weakens monsoon winds, strips cloud cover, bakes the soil dry. The chance of a deficient monsoon this year sits at 35 percent, more than double the long-term average. For a country where nearly half of all farmland depends on rain, not pipes, that figure isn’t just a weather stat. It is a food security warning.
Here is what the headlines often miss: the same summer is killing people in completely different ways depending on where they live and how much money they have. In landlocked Bundelkhand, it is the raw, scorching dry heat. Cities like Banda, Jhansi, and Hamirpur have no sea breeze, no relief. Entire agricultural divisions are recording temperatures 5°C above the seasonal norm. Farmers, who cannot afford to stop working, are out there in it from sunrise. For them, heatstroke is not an abstract risk—it’s a Tuesday.
On the coasts, the story is quieter but in some ways more dangerous. Kerala, Odisha, coastal Andhra Pradesh—the thermometers here read lower than Banda. But the humidity changes everything. What scientists call the ‘wet-bulb temperature’—the measure that combines heat and moisture—can push coastal conditions beyond what the human body can safely handle, even when the raw number on the thermometer looks manageable. An IMD study spanning four decades confirmed that wet-bulb temperatures have been steadily rising across India’s coasts, accelerating sharply since the early 2000s.
The reason is physics. When the air is saturated with moisture, sweat simply cannot evaporate. That’s the body’s only real cooling mechanism, and in high humidity, it stops working. Researchers at Penn State found that even healthy young people start losing the ability to regulate body temperature at around 31°C wet-bulb. Anjal Prakash, an author of a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, has put it starkly: a 40°C day with high humidity can feel like 50°C. For an elderly person in a poorly ventilated home, a fisher returning from sea, or a construction worker in a coastal city, that is not a figure of speech. It is a physiological reality.
In Alappuzha, fishers talk about nights that no longer cool down. In Odisha’s coastal districts, labourers say they are dehydrated within an hour of starting work. Moist heat kills quietly, without the drama of a north Indian heatwave, and so it goes largely ungoverned.
There is something India’s heat conversation rarely talks about: what happens between midnight and 5 am.
Night is when the body is supposed to repair itself. Heart rate drops, core temperature falls, and cells recover from the stress of a hot day. But India’s average night-time temperature has been rising by 0.21°C every decade. Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) data shows 35 of India’s 36 states and Union territories are getting warmer nights. Climate change has added somewhere between 50 and 80 nights a year above the 25°C threshold—the level beyond which quality sleep and physiological recovery become genuinely difficult.
When nights stay hot, the damage from daytime heat accumulates. Exhaustion doesn’t lift. Organs don’t fully repair. For people already weakened—the elderly, the chronically ill, small children—this is how heat kills without ever being recorded as a heatstroke death. A 2024 Climate Trends study in Chennai found indoor night temperatures in many homes sitting above 32°C, sometimes crossing 35°C. These are homes without air conditioning, with thin walls and metal roofs, where the heat that came in during the day has nowhere to go.
A government that issues heatwave alerts for the afternoon but ignores what is happening to a 72-year-old sleeping in a tin-roofed room at midnight is governing only half the crisis.
The people paying the highest price
CEEW’s district-level heat risk assessment is the most comprehensive picture we have of who is most at risk. Across 734 districts, using 35 indicators of hazard, exposure and vulnerability, it found that over 57 percent of India’s districts—home to 76 percent of the population—face high to very high heat risk.
But averages hide the real story. The people most exposed are the ones with the least ability to protect themselves: construction workers, street vendors, gig delivery riders, slum dwellers, agricultural labourers. None of them can work from home. None of them have air conditioning. A CEEW-linked study that followed 3,000 outdoor workers found that a single degree rise in mean temperature cut their daily earnings by 16 percent. During a bad heatwave, earnings fell by 40 percent. A worker averaging ₹268 a day lost over ₹100—not because they chose to, but because the heat made it impossible to keep going.
The damage cascades further. Heat speeds up evaporation from reservoirs already running low. CEEW estimates that water scarcity driven by climate change could cost India over $2.5 trillion by 2050 if irrigation infrastructure isn’t overhauled. Wheat yields fall by more than 5 percent for every degree of warming—a quiet threat to the food security that India spent generations building. And as demand for electricity surges across the summer, grids overload and cut power—most reliably in the areas that can least afford it, trapping people in homes that by then have become ovens.
Economy running a fever too
India’s political class rarely frames this as an economic emergency. It should. The McKinsey Global Institute estimated that heat-related productivity losses could cost India up to $250 billion—around 4.5 percent of GDP—by 2030. The International Labour Organization projects the loss of the equivalent of 34 million full-time jobs to heat stress by the end of this decade. For 2026 specifically, economists are warning that this summer alone—combined with a possible El Niño monsoon failure—could clip off significant GDP growth.
These numbers have faces. Every labourer who rests in the shade instead of working is lost output. Every hospitalisation for heatstroke is a medical bill that wipes out a week’s wages. India’s average humidity has already climbed from 67.1- 71.2 percent in just five years, and the number of hot-humid days has jumped from 14,086 to nearly 17,000 in the past decade. The heat isn’t just uncomfortable. It is slowly draining the economy from the bottom up.
Heat action plans are a start, not the solution
India deserves credit for what it has built. Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan, one of the first in Asia, is estimated to have prevented nearly 2,380 deaths between 2014 and 2015. Several states now have early warning systems, cooling shelters and ORS distribution networks. These things save lives. But they are not saving enough lives, and they are not addressing the root cause.
Cooling centres help once the emergency has arrived. They do not stop cities from becoming furnaces in the first place. CEEW has pointed to a fundamental problem: most Heat Action Plans are not grounded in granular, district-level vulnerability data, which means resources don’t reliably reach the people who need them most. The plans manage a crisis. What India needs is to prevent one.
That means transformative adaptation—changing how cities are designed, how workers are protected, and how ecosystems are managed. Not incremental tweaks. Real change.
Trees, water, and green cover are some of the most cost-effective heat mitigation tools we have. A well-placed tree canopy can cut local surface temperatures by 3-8°C. Restored urban wetlands create natural cooling corridors. But India’s urban local bodies still treat green cover as an aesthetic choice rather than critical infrastructure. That has to change, with enforceable targets, not aspirational ones.
Cool roofs and reflective surfaces can reduce indoor temperatures by 2-4°C at relatively low cost—a realistic retrofit even for low-income housing. Spain’s Murcia city implemented 61 urban heat measures including resurfacing roads with lighter materials, measurably cooling the streets. Phoenix, Arizona, treated 58 kilometres of residential roads with reflective pavement sealant. The Netherlands’ Arnhem is redesigning underused road lanes into shaded green corridors. These are not exotic experiments—they are proven, practical interventions. India has no shortage of heat-stressed cities in which to deploy them.
Protect workers before it is too late. Mandatory midday work stoppages between noon and 3 pm during heatwave alerts exist in several states, but not enough to protect the vulnerable. They need to be enforced, not suggested. Athens, gave its chief heat officer the authority to make guidance binding. Something similar—a dedicated heat governance role with real teeth—deserves serious consideration at the state level here.
What AI and other tech can do
Technology cannot replace shade or a cool roof, but it can help us act faster and smarter.
ARTPARK at IISc Bengaluru has built an AI-driven heat forecasting system that uses deep learning and downscaling to generate sub-district heat forecasts up to ten days ahead. That lead time lets hospitals stock up, municipalities open cooling centres proactively, and construction firms adjust shift timings before workers are in danger—not after.
SEEDS, working with Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, has developed a model that maps heat vulnerability at the neighbourhood level in urban slums, identifying the specific homes most at risk so outreach workers know exactly where to go. In Delhi’s Vivekananda Camp, women community leaders used AI-powered climate risk tools and a weather station to build their own early warning system, issuing household-level alerts during heatwaves. It is a small project. But it is proof that you do not need a large government programme to protect a community—you need the right tools and the right people.
There is more to do here. India needs heat advisory apps that work in regional languages and speak directly to the street vendor and the construction contractor, not just the educated smartphone user. Urban planners should be required to run heat island simulations before any major development is approved—not as a formality, but as a genuine design constraint. And India’s insurance sector has an opportunity to create heat-linked income protection products for informal workers, so that a heatwave does not also mean bankruptcy.
What others have learned and India can borrow
India does not have to figure this out alone. Several countries have been grappling with extreme heat for longer, and some of their lessons are directly transplantable.
Ahmedabad is India’s own proof of concept—it showed that a structured early warning system with community outreach actually works. The question is why, fifteen years later, it is still the exception and not the standard.
Athens appointed a chief heat officer—a dedicated role that sits above the usual departmental silos and can actually coordinate across health, urban planning and emergency services. The officer’s guidance on cooling spaces, hydration and outdoor activity timing was made operationally binding. India’s national and state disaster management authorities would do well to create equivalent roles with real authority.
Murcia, Spain tackled urban overheating with a package of 61 measures, including resurfacing dark asphalt with reflective materials, which significantly cut surface temperatures—a simple intervention with a large impact.
Jodhpur’s RAHAT project, a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the Mahila Housing Trust, is testing cool roofs in informal urban settlements using a women-led community model—with randomised trials to measure what actually works. This kind of rigorous, ground-up, evidence-based adaptation is exactly what Indian cities need funded and scaled.
Arnhem in the Netherlands is redesigning its streets—converting underused car lanes into shaded, tree-lined corridors and mapping which open spaces must be protected to keep temperatures from rising further. City planning as climate adaptation, built into the process from the beginning rather than retrofitted at great expense later.
By the end of this century, projections suggest 70 percent of Indians could face wet-bulb temperatures above 32°C. Around 2 percent could face conditions above 35°C—the rough limit of human survivability. That is not destiny. But it is the road we are currently on.
The people dying in Telangana’s fields and Bundelkhand’s farms this week are not a data point. They are the farmer who sat on his paddy heap in Nizamabad waiting to sell his grain and never came home. They are the labourers in Alappuzha who says the sea breeze doesn’t feel cool anymore.
India has science. It has the institutions. And it has pockets of brilliant innovation. What it has lacked, consistently, is a sense of urgency that matches the scale of what is happening.
Every summer that passes without structural change is a summer that sets a new baseline for the next one. The crisis is not coming. It has arrived. And the people bearing the heaviest burden are the ones who did the least to cause it.
Sanjay K Srivastava | S Radhakrishnan Chair Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru; former Chief of Disaster Risk Reduction at UNESCAP
(Views are personal)