Every summer, India rediscovers its heat problem. Governments issue advisories, meteorological departments release forecasts, and newspapers run alarming headlines about mercury levels exceeding seasonal averages by 3-5°C. The India Meteorological Department has already warned that this year’s transition into summer will be particularly severe. The machinery of seasonal concern creaks dutifully into motion. And then come just as dutifully to a halt.This cycle of alarm and amnesia ignores the reality that heat-related morbidity and systemic heat stress are now year-round phenomena requiring a fundamental shift away from reactive, emergency responses. The past decade has demonstrated that heatwaves are becoming increasingly intense, prolonged and geographically dispersed beyond the traditional pre-monsoon window, evidenced by a 0.9°C rise in India’s mean temperature and an increase of 5-10 heatwave days per decade. This trajectory makes clear that short-term crisis-management frameworks are insufficient to address the chronic thermal stressors that now persist throughout the year.No group bears the cumulative burden of this policy failure more acutely than India’s informal workers, who constitute over 90% of the national workforce. During peak summer months, these workers endure 10-12 hours of daily exposure to direct sunlight, frequently without access to shade, adequate hydration or meaningful rest intervals. However, their vulnerability does not begin in March and end with the monsoon. The conditions that produce heat stress among informal workers are not merely meteorological in origin – they are structural, and perennial. The residential environments available to informal workers provide no meaningful refuge from occupational heat exposure. Informal settlements, typically constructed with heat-trapping materials such as corrugated tin roofing and asbestos sheeting, elevate indoor temperatures by 5-10°C above ambient levels. In cities, the urban heat island effect raises city temperatures by a further 4-7°C degrees above surrounding rural areas due to dense concrete infrastructure, depleted green cover, and heat-retaining urban infrastructure. Together, these conditions hinder overnight physiological recovery. Deprived of the cool conditions necessary for adequate thermoregulation, the body carries the accumulated heat load of each working day into the next. What results is not an acute health episode but a chronic state of heat stress which progressively degrades physical health, diminishes economic productivity and deepens household poverty through the compounding pressures of lost income and rising healthcare expenditure.police personnel drinks water to beat the heat on a hot summer day, in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, Saturday, April 25, 2026. Photo: PTIHeat stress also carries a pronounced gendered dimension that policy has been slow to confront. Women informal workers – concentrated in home-based manufacturing, street vending and domestic work – face a convergence of physiological, social and institutional risk factors. Elevated susceptibility to dehydration, compounded by menstrual and gestational physiology intersects with the absence of clean, public washroom infrastructure that would allow for basic cooling and hygiene. For instance, for a woman street vendor managing her menstrual cycle through a working day in peak heat, the combination of dehydration, sweat, and no access to clean washrooms significantly raises her risk of urinary tract infections, a health issue that surges with warmer temperatures and yet is unaddressed in current heat-health policies.The disproportionate burden of domestic labour further forecloses the possibility of rest during peak heat periods. It is essential, however, to resist the tendency toward categorical homogenisation that treats all women or all informal workers as uniformly vulnerable. Vulnerability to heat stress is shaped by the intersection of age, occupation, housing quality, and pre-existing health conditions, and effective intervention necessitates risk assessments that are capable of capturing how these variables interact and amplify one another. The epidemiological and economic evidence for the scale of harm is substantial, and it stands in troubling contrast to the inadequacy of the institutional response. India’s National Disaster Management Authority recorded 17,706 heat-related deaths between 2000 and 2020 – a figure that, given the persistent and well-documented underreporting of heat as a cause of mortality, almost certainly understates the true toll. The International Labour Organization’s 2024 estimates attribute approximately $100 billion in annual productivity losses to heat stress in India alone.The institutional architecture governing disaster response, however, has still not kept pace with the reality it is meant to govern. Heatwaves remain unclassified as a notified disaster under the Disaster Management Act. The 16th Finance Commission has recently recommended that heatwaves be formally notified as a national disaster, but Finance Commission reports are advisory and carry no legal force. Whether the Union government acts on this recommendation, and how quickly, remains to be seen.Where action has materialised, it has been uneven, incomplete and very recent. At the state level, Odisha’s climate budget tagging attempts to make climate-related expenditure visible and trackable within fiscal planning but it does not disaggregate heat as a distinct stressor or examine the specific vulnerabilities of those most exposed to it. Whether such tagging has produced any observable shift in how heat-related spending is prioritised, monitored or evaluated remains largely undemonstrated. At the city level, the proliferation of municipal Heat Action Plans signals a growing recognition that structured preparedness is necessary. Bengaluru’s ward-level climate action plans, calibrated to localised microclimates, represent a genuine advance in planning specificity. Yet, this progress is a sobering reminder that even the most advanced examples of heat governance India can currently point to is nascent and partial. India is a country of 1.4 billion people distributed across dozens of states and hundreds of cities, many at severe and escalating heat risk. That the frontier of adaptation planning is represented by a fiscal tagging exercise in one state and ward-based climate action planning in one city speaks to how much of the country is still unprepared. Even within these efforts, the limitations are significant. Heat Action Plans are constrained by inadequate funding, weak legal grounding, and insufficient mechanisms for monitoring and accountability. Critically, even the more sophisticated plans tend to group diverse populations into broad risk categories without adequately accounting for how multiple factors combine to concentrate exposure in specific individuals and communities and without recognising the full range of vulnerabilities that heat produces. For example, most plans remain oriented almost exclusively toward the physical health consequences of heat, such as heatstroke, while the psychosocial toll of heat stress like heightened anxiety, fatigue, emotional distress, substance use, and gender-based violence falls entirely outside their scope. These gaps point to a deeper structural problem in which heat adaptation and mitigation in India remains largely top-down, shaped by administrative convenience rather than community realities.Heat is no longer a hazard India can afford to manage in an episodic or siloed manner. The evidence is unambiguous, the costs are accumulating, and the populations bearing those costs have waited long enough for a response equal to the scale of the crisis. What India requires now is the institutional will to reframe how it understands, prepares for, and ultimately governs heat as a structural condition.Akshitha Unnithan is a research assistant at the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies.