Extreme Heat Is Now a Global Health Crisis. Here's What Indian Cities Are Not Doing About It.

By The Indian Netizens

Over four billion people globally are now urban residents, and the concrete infrastructure of their cities is making extreme heat deadlier with every passing summer. India by itself is home to over 513 million of them, nearly 13% of the world's urban population, and its cities are less than prepared for a climate phenomenon that is turning them virtually into ovens. 

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has defined the phenomenon of Urban Heat Island (UHI) as a concentrated urban area that experiences higher temperatures than its surrounding semi-urban or rural areas. The concretisation of natural landscapes significantly alters their thermal properties, causing cities to absorb maximum solar radiation during the day and release it slowly at night. Daytime temperatures in urban areas are about 1–9°C higher than temperatures in their surrounding areas, while nighttime temperatures can differ by as much as 12°C. 

While the UHI effect is a global phenomenon, India’s vulnerability is exceptionally high due to a unique combination of rampant, but often unplanned, urbanization, specific climatic conditions, and extreme socio-economic exposure. India is home to the second-largest urban settlement in the world, with its urban population nearly doubling from 17.92% in 1960 to 36.36% in 2023. This growth, occurring at an unusual rate, is outpacing the implementation of environmental safeguards. Tier-2 cities in India, such as Patiala, Jamshedpur, Ahmedabad, and Surat, are increasingly vulnerable to the UHI effect as they expand rapidly without the planning capacity or infrastructure found in the Tier-1 metropolises, and while these metropolises like Delhi and Mumbai are often the focus of research for studying the impact of climate change, it has been indicated that urbanization may actually contribute significantly to temperature rise in smaller, developing cities. Research shows that smaller cities such as Jamshedpur, Raipur, Patna, and Indore rank highest in India in terms of the specific contribution of urbanisation to rising land surface temperatures as a consequence of the robust effects of UHI.

Globally, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serve as a critical international framework for identifying and implementing climate adaptation measures in cities, specifically SDG 11 (“Sustainable Cities and Communities”) and SDG 13 (“Climate Action”). Aligning with this framework, India has the Heat Action Plans (HAPs), but only on paper. Initially launched at the city level in response to devastating heatwaves, the HAPs represent India's primary defence against the growing climate hazard of heatwaves, shifting the focus from emergency response to proactive, data-driven management. However, reports indicate that while 17 to 23 heat-prone states have prepared HAPs, the formal adoption of these plans at the state level remains fragmented. The frequency of heatwaves in India has escalated significantly over the past several decades, yet the introduction and execution of HAPs have been unable to keep pace with the change of this scale.

The execution of HAPs in India is characterized by several systemic implementation gaps that span governance, legal frameworks, financial resources, and data resolution. A primary barrier to effective implementation has been the lack of coordination between different levels and departments of government. Many HAPs lack synchronicity with broader district and state-level institutional mechanisms, often remaining standalone advisories rather than integrated policy directives.

The absence of a legally binding framework reduces the authority of HAPs, often leaving them as advisory documents rather than mandatory regulations. While these plans have been successful in reducing mortality in specific regions, their overall effectiveness has been hampered by a disconnect between short-term emergency response and long-term urban resilience planning. Many HAPs rely on district or state-level projections that fail to capture the hyper-local UHI effects occurring in the Tier-2 cities. Estimating the UHI intensity in these cities is necessary to ensure the development of smart and sustainable infrastructure before they become irrepairable, like some Tier-1 cities.

To mitigate the UHI effect effectively, recommendations must span from immediate life-saving emergency responses to long-term structural changes in urban planning and policy, because, despite their vulnerability, Tier-2 cities are still considered as having an opportunity to chart a different course by avoiding the planning mistakes of Tier-1 cities. Cities should adopt comprehensive HAPs, such as the pioneering Ahmedabad model which has established clear protocols for inter-agency coordination and emergency response.

Occupational standards should be adjusted to reschedule working hours for outdoor labourers such as construction workers, gig workers, traffic police, and street vendors, shifting strenuous activity to cooler early morning or late evening hours and mandating rest breaks in shaded areas. A recent example of urban heat-resilient infrastructure development comes from Jaipur, wherein the local Municipal Corporation created Net Zero Cooling Stations. By mainstreaming heat resilience into early-stage development schemes and building the capacity of local urban planners, these cities can integrate adaptive strategies like cool roofs, urban greening, and lakefront redevelopment before they become overly congested. Developing long-term strategies needs to be prioritised instead of resorting to band-aid-like solutions during the extended period of summer from March to June every year. 

UHI has impacted human productivity in the summer months for nearly a decade now, and it only multiplies with each passing year. A daily wage labourer who loses his or her income due to heat exhaustion, or the children living in a dense urban settlement and sleeping under tin-roof houses in an environment of extreme heat- these are not statistics in a climate report but the consequences of a governance system that has consistently confused planning with protection. India's HAPs represent genuine policy intent, but intent without appropriate and timely implementation is not adaptation; it is simply paperwork, a mere checkbox exercise. As the world, especially the Global South, looks up at nations like India to demonstrate that climate commitments can be made real at the local level, the answers currently found in its Tier-2 cities are far from encouraging. This scenario demands to be changed, not at the next COP or after the next election cycle, but before the next summer arrives.

Written By: Ritika Singh Thakur Edited by: Bhaskar Jha