{"id":6815,"date":"2026-05-22T14:35:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T14:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/2026\/05\/22\/india-is-being-left-to-die-in-the-heat\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T14:35:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T14:35:51","slug":"india-is-being-left-to-die-in-the-heat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/2026\/05\/22\/india-is-being-left-to-die-in-the-heat\/","title":{"rendered":"India is being left to die in the heat"},"content":{"rendered":"
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India is experiencing an extraordinary summer.<\/p>\n

Across the country, temperatures have crossed 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit), inching towards 46, with Akola in Maharashtra\u2019s Vidarbha region recording the country\u2019s highest temperature of 46.9C on April 26. Census workers have died, as have voters who stepped out in the recently concluded West Bengal election. A man who boarded a bus to attend a wedding died before he reached his destination. On a single day in late April, all of the top 50 hottest cities in the world were located in India.<\/p>\n

There is a violence to the light, the kind that makes you shield your eyes \u2013 even at 7am. With farmers unable to work outside, livestock under heat stress and crops failing, the United Nations is concerned that the heatwaves are pushing food supply \u201cto the brink\u201d. Even more alarming is that the extreme heat is causing not just heart attacks, but also kidney injury, affecting sleep quality and exacerbating numerous chronic conditions, including diabetes, respiratory illnesses and mental health conditions.<\/p>\n

While the newspapers record a few deaths here and there, the majority of heat-related deaths go unrecorded in India. I know, from my decades as a health reporter, that those who die early in any catastrophe \u2013 like the HIV patients of the 1980s, or COVID-19 more recently \u2013 become numbers. Only after we have a mountain of bodies do we think to raise a flag and give it a name, perhaps even its own day.<\/p>\n

India has reached that point.<\/p>\n

In fact, the 16th Finance Commission has recommended that heatwaves be notified as national disasters, but getting funds out of this government to mitigate these deaths, or compensation for the families of victims, comes with red tape that can reduce hardened warriors to tears.<\/p>\n

As the climate heats up, the rest of the world looks at green cover \u2013 trees, wetlands and biodiversity hotspots \u2013 as central to mitigating a warming planet. Not in India. Here, between the government, the courts and private developers, there is an orgy of tree-felling across the worst-affected cities. In Nashik, despite protests, heritage banyan trees that have stood for decades, if not centuries, are being cut down. In Pune, too, old trees are making way for a four-lane highway. In Bengaluru, trees are making way for a metro train and in Kashmir, which has never experienced such heat, mulberry, walnut and chinar trees have to go for wider roads and \u201csmarter\u201d cities.<\/p>\n

Back when he came to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi alarmed many Indian scientists and researchers by denying climate change. \u201cClimate has not changed. We have changed. Our habits have changed,\u201d he told students.<\/p>\n

The heat pummelling India\u2019s megacities is reinforcing longstanding inequalities of caste, class and gender in poor and marginalised communities. Our treeless streets are abandoned, save for the homeless and the street hawkers. The rich travel from their air-conditioned houses in their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned offices, malls and schools. The poor are being left to die in a country that keeps inventing new ways of neglecting its most vulnerable populations. Watching this heat, Harvard\u2019s South Asia Institute released a white paper asking an innocuous question: how hot is too hot? Researchers say the human body can only handle so much heat before it can no longer cool itself, and that limit is below a wet-bulb temperature of 35C. Above this limit, even a young, healthy person resting in the shade with access to ample drinking water and skin fully coated in sweat would experience a continual rise in core temperature, leading to death from heatstroke within hours.<\/p>\n

The paper grimly adds that nearly 380 million Indians are living in conditions that exceed the capabilities of human physiology.<\/p>\n

After making living conditions worse, the Modi administration, characteristically, has done nothing to transparently record annual heat-related deaths. There is growing criticism from scientists, journalists and public health experts that India\u2019s heat data systems are fragmented, inconsistent, slow and opaque. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) is also facing criticism about transparency in temperature readings. In 2024, the IMD blamed a \u201cfaulty sensor\u201d for an erroneous recording of 52.9C on May 29.<\/p>\n

Each year, the excruciating summer marks a new level of public scrutiny of the IMD system that is long overdue.<\/p>\n

The impacts of this year\u2019s heatwave are still being analysed. But for everyone who lived through it, this was a relentless two-month emergency, with no respite. Well into the heatwave \u2013 after temperatures remained above 40C for 40 consecutive days \u2013 the Modi government implemented its much-awaited Heat Wave Action Plan. As with every crisis, Modi had turned this deadly heatwave into a branding opportunity. With cameras rolling and citizens queueing up, government officials were seen forcefully wiping faces with towels whose origins were unknown. Much like COVID certificates that carried his photo, India\u2019s newly rolled-out \u201ccooling points\u201d \u2013 unveiled across the national capital \u2013 were plastered with the prime minister\u2019s face, and the taxpayer-funded heatwave action plan is the latest in a series of loyalty programmes that expect the public to remain indebted to the ruling party.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the country now has collective wisdom from having survived nationally traumatic events such as demonetisation, the abrogation of Article 370 and COVID-19 lockdowns: we are on our own. If you are looking for some profound meditation on the catastrophe caused by global heating, it will not be found now. That is for the people who come after us. For now, we grapple with this on our own. Just us and these terrible men \u2013 for it is mostly men \u2013 who fell trees and spend other people\u2019s lives as pocket change.<\/p>\n

What I know for certain is that a prime minister who does not believe in climate change will not be an ally in the fight against extreme weather events.<\/p>\n

The views expressed in this article are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera\u2019s editorial stance.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

India is experiencing an extraordinary summer. Across the country, temperatures have crossed 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit), inching towards 46, with Akola in Maharashtra\u2019s Vidarbha region recording the country\u2019s highest temperature of 46.9C on April 26. Census workers have died, as have voters who stepped out in the recently concluded West Bengal election. A … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}