India’s heat crisis has transformed into a full-blown public health emergency. According to a 2025 study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, 57% of Indian districts are now classified as high to very high risk zones for extreme heat, impacting 76% of the population. Summer temperatures, accompanied by heatwaves and rising humidity, are rising: a 2026 report published in Scientific Reports says that the extent of heat hotspots in India has increased by 1.5 times in the last 26 years. In fact, the Indian Meteorological Department has already begun issuing heatwave alerts this year. The implications of longer and more intense heatwaves are profound. In 2024 — the hottest year on record — there were more than 44,000 cases of heatstroke, said the CEEW study. India also lost an estimated 160 billion labour hours due to heat exposure in 2021, equivalent to 5.4% of its GDP, a recent study by ClimateRISE Alliance and Dasra highlighted. Significantly, the burden of this extreme heat is not shared equally. In a country where a large share of the workforce is in the informal sector, individuals are often forced to choose between protecting their health and sustaining their livelihoods. Construction workers, street vendors, sanitation staff, farmers, and gig delivery partners who do not have access to cooling infrastructure on account of the nature of their jobs are among those disproportionately affected. This uneven impact highlights a growing form of inequality that has now been christened ‘thermal injustice’.
India’s institutional response to this burgeoning challenge remains limited. What is illuminating is that there exist legal lacunae that undermine effective intervention. The Factories Act, 1948, for instance, protects only those in indoor workrooms. Strangely, the new Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 strips state governments of the powers to set heat standards; the power to regulate ventilation and temperature norms has been vested in the Centre without any minimum standards set. The failure to include heatwaves in the Nationally Notified Disaster list is further proof of major institutional inertia. As a result of this, states are restricted to the 10% trap, wherein they can utilise only a small fraction of state disaster funds for relief efforts in this direction. Legal acknowledgement of the right to cooling as a fundamental right is no longer an aspirational goal — it is sine qua non. Only then can the State be compelled to treat protection from extreme heat as a basic obligation owed to every citizen.
