The Heat Nobody Is Governing: India's Cities and the Missing Urban Heat Plan

In May 2023, temperatures in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar crossed 44 degrees Celsius for days on end, and hospitals in Ballia district reported dozens of suspected heat stroke deaths within a 48-hour window. The following summer, Delhi recorded its highest ever temperature reading, and construction and gig workers continued making deliveries and pouring concrete through the hottest hours because daily wages left no room for a self-imposed siesta. Heat waves, once treated as an unpleasant but survivable feature of the Indian summer, are increasingly recognised by public health researchers as a leading and undercounted cause of excess mortality, one that kills quietly, often attributed to comorbidities rather than the heat itself on death certificates, and that falls hardest on those with the least ability to escape it.

Ahmedabad's model and its limited replication

India's institutional response to this threat traces back to Ahmedabad, which in 2013 became the first South Asian city to adopt a formal Heat Action Plan following a lethal 2010 heat wave. The plan, developed with the Indian Institute of Public Health and international partners, introduced early warning systems tied to colour-coded alerts, training for healthcare workers to recognise and treat heat stroke, public messaging about hydration and shade, and coordination between the municipal corporation, weather department and hospitals. Studies estimated the plan averted hundreds of deaths in subsequent heat waves and it became the template that the National Disaster Management Authority encouraged other states and cities to replicate.

More than a hundred cities and several states now have some version of a Heat Action Plan on paper. The gap between the Ahmedabad original and most of its replicas, however, is stark. A widely cited independent review by the Centre for Policy Research found that the large majority of these plans lacked clear budget allocations, relied on generic templates rather than city-specific vulnerability mapping, and were not tied to any legal mandate that made implementation compulsory rather than discretionary. A plan that exists as a document circulated to municipal departments each April, without dedicated staff, monitoring or funding, is a plan in name only.

Heat is a labour and housing problem, not just a weather problem

The deepest flaw in how India governs heat is that it treats the problem as meteorological rather than structural. The workers most at risk during a heat wave, construction labourers, street vendors, agricultural workers, delivery riders and those living in tin-roofed informal settlements, are exposed to extreme heat by the basic conditions of their work and housing, not merely by a temporary weather anomaly. India's occupational safety framework, even after the consolidation of labour codes, contains no enforceable national standard mandating rest breaks, shaded work areas or work-hour restrictions during extreme heat comparable to the frameworks some Gulf states have introduced for outdoor labour, despite India facing comparable or worse wet-bulb temperature risk in several regions.

Housing compounds the exposure. Informal settlements built with metal or asbestos roofing can see indoor temperatures exceed outdoor ambient temperature by several degrees, turning homes into heat traps precisely when residents most need refuge. A small number of pilot projects, including reflective roof coating programmes in Ahmedabad and Chennai, have shown measurable reductions in indoor temperature at low cost, yet these remain scattered interventions rather than a scaled municipal or national housing policy commitment.

The data problem: undercounting deaths, underestimating risk

India's official heat wave death toll figures, compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau and the India Meteorological Department, are widely regarded by public health researchers as substantial undercounts, because heat stress frequently exacerbates existing cardiovascular or renal conditions and is recorded as the proximate rather than underlying cause of death. Without robust surveillance connecting hospital admissions, mortality data and temperature records in real time, city governments lack the evidence base to target interventions at the neighbourhoods and populations facing the highest actual risk, and the political system lacks the visible death toll that tends to be a precondition for sustained funding and attention in Indian governance.

What actual heat governance would require

A serious national heat governance framework would need several elements that remain absent or nascent. First, classifying heat waves under the Disaster Management Act with the same statutory seriousness as floods or cyclones, which would unlock dedicated State and National Disaster Response Fund allocations rather than leaving heat action plans to compete for ad hoc municipal budgets. Second, enforceable occupational heat safety rules covering outdoor and informal sector workers, potentially linked to wage compensation schemes for lost hours during extreme heat days, similar in spirit to how some state governments already halt manual scavenging or construction during severe pollution episodes. Third, integrating heat resilience into urban planning itself, mandating cool roofing materials in building codes, protecting and expanding urban green cover and water bodies that provide localised cooling, and reversing the trend of paving over the very open spaces that once moderated city temperatures.

A counter-argument worth taking seriously

Some urban planners argue that heat governance, unlike flood or earthquake preparedness, faces an inherent design problem: heat is chronic and diffuse rather than a discrete event with a clear before-and-after, making the disaster-response model an awkward fit. Building a hundred-day-a-year adaptation strategy is a fundamentally different administrative task than staging an emergency response for a forty-eight hour cyclone landfall, and city governments already stretched thin on core services like water supply and waste management may reasonably ask whether heat deserves a separate institutional apparatus rather than being folded into existing public health and housing programmes. This is a fair challenge, but it argues for integration rather than neglect. Heat resilience measures, cool roofs, shaded public transit stops, extended library and public building hours as cooling centres, can and should be embedded within existing municipal functions rather than requiring an entirely new bureaucracy, provided city governments treat the embedding as a genuine budget line rather than a seasonal press release.

India's summers are measurably getting longer and hotter, and the human cost is already visible in mortality data that undercounts the true toll. The country has the institutional template, in Ahmedabad's original plan, to build something durable. What is missing is the political recognition that heat deserves the same disaster status, statutory backing and sustained funding that cyclones and floods have long received, rather than a laminated advisory pinned to a municipal noticeboard each April.