As heat waves sweep India, cities shockingly short of long-term response measures

Are Indian cities, home to crores of outdoor workers, prepared and have effective strategies in place to deal with the heat stress?

The cities seem to be focussing on short-term measures rather than looking at long-term proactive responses, suggests a new survey published by the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, a New Delhi-based research organisation.

The survey — titled Is India Ready for a Warming World? How Heat Resilience Measures Are Being Implemented for 11% of India’s Urban Population in Some of Its Most At-Risk Cities — covered nine Indian cities that represent 11 per cent of the country’s urban population. And the findings are alarming.

Outdoor workforce suffers

Take the case of Surat, where 60 per cent of the workforce consists of migrants employed in the textile and diamond industries. The city turns into a furnace every summer, with no cooling systems like fans. Workers toil under suffocating asbestos roofs that trap heat.

In Bengaluru, where the construction boom never slows, the idea of reduced working hours in the scorching heat is unheard of.

The chart below shows how officers from various departments — such as labour, health and urban planning — responded to queries on heat waves.

Workers lay bricks and mix cement under an unrelenting sun, their sweat the only respite they get.

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Even at the height of a heatwave, gig workers in Indian cities ride tirelessly to deliver the commodities on time. Construction workers, street vendors, waste pickers, autorickshaw drivers and more – data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) indicates that 18 per cent of India's non-farm workforce operates outdoors.

Quick fixes

The trend of rising temperatures is not new to India. The year 2024 was the warmest in the country since 1901, with the country’s highest annual mean temperature reaching 25.75°C, which is 0.65°C above the long-term average. The frequency, duration and intensity of heatwaves have notably increased over recent decades, with projections indicating a substantial rise in these extreme events throughout the 21st century.

In this background, cities would be expected to look at long-term measures to address the effect of heat waves, but local administrations are instead looking at short-term measures, says the report. While all nine cities – Bengaluru, Delhi, Faridabad, Gwalior, Kota, Ludhiana, Meerut, Mumbai and Surat – focus on immediate responses to heat waves, long-term actions remain rare and where they do exist, they are poorly targeted, the report says.

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Short-term emergency responses include access to drinking water, changing work schedules, and boosting hospital capacity before or during a heat wave. City governments have often focussed on these measures in their heat action plans and press releases.

The chart below shows the range of measures that can be taken to address heat-waves.

Poorly implemented

Even the short-term measures are poorly implemented. Urban health nurses, whose work includes door-to-door vaccination of infants and attending pregnant women, do not even have access to chilled drinking water in hospitals.

“We carry our own water and juices, and work long hours in the heat. When we, who are working directly under the government, are not benefitting from these services, I wonder who else is,” Mala, an urban health nurse from Chennai, told The Federal.

There are flaws in implementing short-term responses as well. “The meteorological department predicts the occurrence of heat waves but the health department is not prepared until incidents of heat stroke occur,” said Uma Reddy, a Bengalurean.

The Tamil Nadu Resident Doctors Association (TNRDA) urged the state government to increase medical infrastructure readiness, set up dedicated heat stroke management units in all hospitals and emergency cooling stations at public spaces.

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“There is a need to deploy heatwave response teams in high risk spaces and issue real time heatwave alerts via SMS as we are seeing an increase in heatstroke, dehydration and cardiovascular complications due to extreme temperatures,” Dr M Keerthy Varman, general secretary, TNRDA, told The Federal.

Long-term solutions

As per the Sustainable Futures Collaborative report, long-term actions are absent from all nine cities.

“Actions like making household or occupational cooling available to the most heat-exposed, developing insurance cover for lost work, expanding fire management services for heat waves, and electricity grid retrofits to improve transmission reliability and distribution safety are missing from all cities,” the report said.

Experts say the long-term solutions should focus on the economy and not just health. “Health is not the only outcome of heat stress but since it is emotional, policy makers focus on it more,” said Vikas Desai, technical director, Urban Health and Climate Resilience Centre of Excellence.

Proactive measures

City governments should map urban heat islands and localities with heat-exposed population, expand local weather stations, urban shade and green cover and deploy rooftop solar, pointed out the report. This is seconded by experts.

“Surat has ten weather monitoring stations. It should at least be doubled to get precise data from localities. Weather reports should be released in the public domain and should be regularly analysed by academic institutions, researchers and corporations,” said Desai.

On the ground, governments scramble to patch up crises with band-aid solutions, reacting to disasters instead of preventing them.

“Heat action was primarily driven by rapid response guidelines (such as emergency response letters or orders) issued by state or central authorities. For example, the health ministry instructed states to ensure ORS availability and set up heatstroke rooms in hospitals, while the education department directed states to close schools," said Tamanna Dalal, one of the authors of the study.

"However, the nature of these orders meant they were focused on short-term emergency measures to save lives during heatwaves, rather than on long-term preventative measures to reduce future heat stress."

Long-term intervention

For effective heat resilience, cities need to adopt certain non-negotiable long-term interventions.

“Conservation/restoration of blue green integrated networks, promoting decentralised rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge, enforcing mandatory green building codes, integrated traditional practices and knowledge with modern technology, plug-in heat resilience in urban plans and policies and establishing participatory community-based heat action plans with long-term monitoring are the need of the hour,” said Priya Narayanan, Senior Programme Manager, WRI India, an independent charity.

The practice of responding to disaster from a very response and recovery mode to a preparedness mode is needed, while short-term actions are important, long-term is critical, she added.