Extreme heat is becoming an increasingly persistent feature of Indian summers. Heatwaves that were once treated as exceptional events are occurring more frequently, lasting longer and affecting larger parts of the country. As dangerous temperatures become embedded within everyday life, India faces a policy challenge that extends well beyond responding to seasonal weather events.
The scale of that challenge is difficult to ignore. A district-level assessment by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) found that 57 percent of India’s districts, home to 76 percent of the population, now face high to very high heat risk. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley estimate that a single day of extreme heat could result in more than 3,400 excess deaths nationwide, with prolonged heatwaves causing far greater losses.
Yet public policy continues to approach extreme heat primarily through seasonal emergency responses despite its growing implications for labour productivity, public health, urban infrastructure and long-term economic growth. As forecasting capabilities improve and scientific uncertainty declines, India’s central challenge is becoming less about predicting dangerous temperatures and more about ensuring that warnings consistently trigger timely public action.
When Early Warnings Lose Their Policy Value
Early warning systems create public value only when they trigger action before risks become crises. That relationship weakens when hazards become familiar. Unlike floods, cyclones and earthquakes, which mobilise governments and the public through sudden disruption, extreme heat unfolds gradually and returns every summer. Over time, dangerous temperatures risk becoming treated as an ordinary condition of work and daily life rather than an exceptional public threat.
Schools temporarily adjust timings, hospitals prepare for higher admissions, outdoor workers continue because livelihoods depend upon daily wages, and governments issue precautionary advisories before attention shifts with the arrival of the monsoon. While these responses help society cope with recurring heat, they also risk allowing individual adaptation to substitute for broader public action, reducing the ability of early warnings to generate meaningful institutional responses.
The Costs of Normalising Heat
The consequences extend well beyond public health. India’s labour-intensive growth model leaves a substantial share of economic activity directly exposed to rising temperatures. Construction workers, agricultural labourers, transport workers, delivery personnel and street vendors experience declining productivity, shorter working hours and greater health risks as temperatures rise, while electricity demand increases sharply to meet cooling needs.
Unlike sudden disasters, however, these impacts accumulate gradually across sectors and successive summers. Because they rarely produce a single catastrophic event, they seldom command the urgency associated with floods or cyclones, even as their cumulative economic costs continue to grow. The danger therefore lies not only in rising temperatures but also in allowing their consequences to become institutionally routine. As extreme heat becomes embedded within everyday economic activity, adaptation becomes an increasingly important determinant of labour productivity, urban competitiveness and long-term economic resilience.
From Forecasts to Automatic Action
India’s policy challenge is to embed heat resilience within routine governance so that forecasts automatically activate predefined responses across government rather than relying on administrative discretion.
One way of achieving this is through institutional trigger mechanisms. Similar to the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) for air pollution, predefined temperature thresholds could automatically activate revised outdoor work schedules, changes in school timings, emergency hospital protocols, cooling centres and targeted support for vulnerable populations. Such trigger-based systems would strengthen coordination across departments while making protective measures more predictable and consistent.
Existing Heat Action Plans provide an important foundation, yet implementation remains uneven. A recent CEEW assessment found that 95 percent of these plans lack comprehensive risk and vulnerability assessments, limiting their ability to identify the communities most exposed to extreme heat. Strengthening these plans requires clearer implementation responsibilities, stronger accountability for execution and closer coordination across departments. The National Disaster Management Authority can play an important role by integrating extreme heat more firmly into India’s broader disaster governance framework.
Building Heat Resilience into Everyday Governance
Automatic emergency responses reduce the immediate risks posed by heatwaves, but long-term resilience depends on reducing exposure before dangerous temperatures occur. Heat resilience should therefore become an organising principle of urban governance, informing planning, labour regulation and public health policy throughout the year. Expanding urban green cover, increasing shaded public spaces, promoting heat-resilient infrastructure and integrating cooling strategies into city planning are investments in economic resilience as much as environmental sustainability. By reducing heat exposure, they protect labour productivity, lower healthcare costs and improve the functioning of cities simultaneously.
International experience reinforces the importance of embedding heat resilience within routine governance. Following the devastating 2003 heatwave, France strengthened predefined response systems while integrating cooling infrastructure into long-term urban planning. India’s climatic conditions, labour market and scale require context-specific solutions, but one lesson travels well across jurisdictions: resilience is strongest when responses are anticipated, coordinated and routinely activated rather than improvised after temperatures have already become dangerous.
India is no longer constrained by an inability to predict dangerous temperatures. Increasingly, it is constrained by whether public institutions respond to those predictions with sufficient consistency. As extreme heat becomes a recurring feature of Indian summers, climate resilience will depend less on forecasting the next heatwave than on ensuring that every warning reliably changes how governments, employers and public services respond.