People living in underdeveloped parts of central India are most vulnerable to the health impacts of heat waves, a Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI) for India has found.
The index considered various factors including a person’s age, caste, income and health, as well as the green cover in an area, as having a bearing on people’s heat vulnerability, and its analysis of 640 (of the 707) districts in the country finds ten districts to be “very high risk.” Six of these are in relatively underdeveloped areas in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. In contrast, the 20 districts in
