Rising temperature: Public policy responses must become proactive

April this year recorded the highest maximum temperature in the past three years and the warmest night in the past six. With each year surpassing earlier ones in heat stress, the need for a more effective public-policy response to heat-related risks is growing urgent. Though heatwaves are common across northern India during April-June, their duration and intensity have steadily increased. Last year, for instance, the country faced record-breaking heatwave days, resulting in over 40,000 heatstroke cases and 143 deaths. There is no shortage of forecasts and early-warning systems predicting increasingly scorching summers. By the first week of April, for instance, the India Meteorological Department had forecast that temperatures across northern and central India would cross 40 degrees centigrade in the month, levels normally recorded in mid-May, as the monsoon systems approach. The real challenge is to fashion an effective response that meaningfully protects the Indian public — including the poorest and most vulnerable — from the worst consequences of successively hotter summers induced by climate change.

 

Public-policy responses demand a combination of immediate preparedness and long-term strategies of adaptation and mitigation, processes that require coordinated action from agencies at all levels of government — central, state, and local. Heatwave preparedness usually takes the form of Heat Action Plans (HAPs), which are implemented at local government levels. They generally include such initiatives as temporary cooling shelters and water kiosks, public awareness campaigns, and revised work hours for outdoor workers. Overall, more than 100 cities are said to have developed HAPs over the past decade or so. Though useful, these plans have weaknesses. They tend to be reactive, being put in place once temperatures start rising. Also, being mostly advisory in nature, the urgency of responses from the agencies concerned is extremely variable. For instance, in 2021, the National Programme on Climate Change & Human Health and the National Centre for Disease Control issued guidelines for reducing heat-related deaths, including a National Action Plan on heat-related illnesses. In 2024, guidelines were issued on emergency cooling and autopsy findings for heat-related deaths. But last year, a report by non-profit HeatWatch pointed out that most health care professionals were unaware of these guidelines and most hospitals lacked the infrastructure to tackle rising heatwave cases.

 

The upshot is that not only are heatwave-related deaths undercounted, policy responses inevitably lag the facts. Given the increasing severity of the situation, it may be time, for instance, for advisories on heatwave-related protocols to become mandatory and subject to punitive fines for violation. This could benefit labourers in the vast unorganised sector — from construction labourers to platform-related delivery personnel — who remain vulnerable to employers’ demands and visibly operate in extreme temperatures. Now that global warming has become an incontrovertible fact, India would gain from accelerating sharply the shift to renewable energy, scaling back its dependence on fossil fuel, which rises exponentially with the temperature. This April, peak power demand surged over 11 per cent over the same month last year. With coal still driving power generation, India’s energy mix remains climatically unsustainable. Each hotter, longer heatwave is a reminder that the power of the sun can be harnessed productively to mitigate the soaring temperatures, which are impacting economic productivity in unanticipated ways.