The Heat is On: Why Indian Cities Can't Keep Winging It Every Summer

Every summer arrives with the familiar routine where news channels are showing a split screen of temperature touching 47 degree celsius, hospitals opening special wards, and municipalities issuing heatwave advisory notices. 

Who actually pays for the heat

Not everyone faces the 45-degree afternoon the same way. A person working in a construction site, a vendor selling vegetables with no shade, a delivery rider, none of them get to escape into an air-conditioned room the way an office worker might. Same temperature, very different day. 

IMD’s own data estimates over 10,000 heatwave deaths in India between 2000 and 2020, and honestly, this number is probably low. Heat rarely gets written down as a cause of death, health reports usually claim that the heart or kidneys were already struggling. Then there’s the economic side, which gets far less attention than it should. The Lancet Countdown’s 2025 edition estimated that India lost 247 billion potential labour hours to heat exposure in 2024, a rise of more than 120% since the 1990s. Behind that figure are daily-wage workers who simply couldn’t afford to stop, and lost income they never got back.

Why Cities Make Their Own Problem Worse

A lot of this comes down to how Indian cities are physically built. Concrete, tar and glass soak up heat through the day. They let it go slowly, well into the night, so the temperature barely dips even after sunset. Urban planners call this the heat island effect. Fewer trees, disappearing wetlands, and the exhaust from every AC unit and vehicle only add to it, as the  city is generating heat almost as much as the sunlight it’s absorbing. Delhi this April ran about 3.1°C above its usual seasonal average. On paper that doesn’t sound like much, but on the ground, it’s the difference between a hot day and one where hospitals start bracing themselves.

Green cover isn’t helping much either. The same Lancet Countdown assessment found that average urban greenness across Indian cities fell by 3.6% between 2015 and 2024, with Tamluk, in West Bengal, is the only city among 189 major cities rated as having genuinely high greenness. Fewer trees mean less shade and slower natural cooling in exactly the neighbourhoods that need it most.

What Governments Are Actually Doing

To be fair, India hasn't been sitting still. The story started  in Ahmedabad, where a brutal 2010 heatwave pushed the city to launch South Asia's first Heat Action Plan in 2013, early warnings, hospital training, cooling shelters, and rescheduled work hours for outdoor labour. Studies later credited it with saving hundreds of lives a year, and the model spread. Today, over 250 cities and districts across 23 states have some version of a Heat Action Plan.

This year's response has been the most visible yet. Delhi’s 2026 plan brought thermal mapping of hotspots, “cool rooms” at over 30 hospitals, misting systems at bus stops, and a construction ban between 12 pm and 3 pm on severe-heatwave days. The Disaster Management Act, 2005 now lets states tap disaster relief funds for heat, and the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling in M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India went as far as reading a right to be free from climate change’s adverse effects into Article 21.

The catch, as experts keep pointing out, is that most of this is short-term triage. Water kiosks and ORS packets help someone survive today but don’t fix a city that traps heat by design. A study of nine cities by the Sustainable Futures Collaborative found that longer-term measures, tree cover, open spaces, cool roofs, rooftop solar remain the exception, and are rarely aimed at the people who need them most.

Fixing the Emergency, Not Just Managing It

A plan that switches on every May and switches off by July only gets a city only so far. Cool roofs shouldn't be something a builder can choose to skip, they belong in the building code, full stop. Footpaths and bus stops need actual shade, not an afterthought once the concrete's already poured. Labour law needs a clause for heat stress the same way it has one for any other on-the-job hazard, with teeth for the gig workers and daily wagers who can’t just decide to sit out a red-alert day. And someone in each city needs to be answerable for all of it, because right now heat sits across so many departments- health, municipal bodies, disaster management, that in practice belongs to none of them.

Heat is no longer just a seasonal phenomenon, it has become something you can’t escape. The cities that treat it as an urban planning problem, not just a summer inconvenience, are the ones that will still be functioning through the April to come.

What would it take for your city to plan for heat the way it plans for floods? That’s the conversation worth having before next summer arrives.