Why India’s Heat Plans And Funding Must Go Beyond Crisis Response
Despite rising temperatures, India's fragmented approach to heat financing leaves solutions stuck in reactive mode. We spoke to experts to understand the politics and possibilities of heat financing
India’s heat action plans are underfunded and built on weak legal foundations, it has been established. Funding falters for heat action because it is difficult to estimate heat-related loss; local governments are rarely consulted; and heat is excluded from the national and state-specific definitions of disasters. The financing gap is particularly disastrous for almost 90% of India’s workforce employed in the informal sector and disproportionately exposed to heat stress. Facilities for worker protection – such as free water coolers or rest areas – are patchy and implemented at the discretion of individual companies.
We spoke to Nihal Ranjit from the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Uma Pal from the Climate Policy Initiative, and Apekshita Varshney from HeatWatch, to understand the politics and possibilities of heat financing.
Why does India lack a concrete financial architecture to combat extreme heat? Why are heat waves treated differently than, say, air pollution?
Apekshita Varshney: We don’t have a dedicated fund for heat because heat is not notified as a disaster under the National Disaster Management Act, 2005. The NDMA has issued guidelines for heatwave management for states since 2016. States are able to use 10% of the State Disaster Response Funds (SDRF) available to them for ‘state-specified disasters’. So states like Odisha, Rajasthan, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh which have incorporated heatwave management into their disaster management plans can utilise this portion for any heat stress related change; however, the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF) is not available to them.
Uma Pal: The reasons for this exclusion are historical and structural. Historically, heat waves were not considered to significantly impact public health, well-being, or infrastructure systems, unlike other disasters such as cyclones or floods. Consequently, tracking heatwave data and acknowledging their impact, especially on vulnerable populations, has only recently become a focus as the occurrence of extreme heat events has increased over time.
Nihal Ranjit: The kind of institutional response we see is shaped both by the nature of the hazard and how it’s categorized within government frameworks. Heat and air pollution, for instance, sit within very different institutional homes: air pollution falls under the purview of the Central Pollution Control Board within the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, whereas disasters like heatwaves are managed by the National Disaster Management Authority, which comes under the Ministry of Home Affairs. While heat and air pollution are both escalating public health risks, it may not be meaningful to compare them directly, given this divergence. A more appropriate comparison is between heat and other natural hazards like cyclones or droughts, which are also climate-exacerbated, slow- or rapid-onset events. Yet, heat continues to receive far less institutional attention and investment compared to other disasters.
Moreover, the nature of funding and types of actions being pursued for these hazards are fundamentally different and shaped by the institutional frameworks they fall under. The National Clean Air Action Programme, for instance, focuses primarily on research, monitoring, and long-term mitigation strategies to reduce pollution levels. However, it doesn’t provide any form of compensation or direct relief to individuals suffering from air pollution-related health impacts.If heat were to be notified as a disaster at the national level, it would open access to both the NDRF and SDRF which come with established norms for relief, assistance, and post-even compensation.
Has there been resistance to including heat as a notified disaster under the NDMA?
Nihal: Notifying heat as a disaster at the national level would allow for financial assistance and relief for those impacted by heatwaves and compensation for heat-related deaths. However, the mechanisms we currently have to capture heat-related deaths and other heat related health impacts are not robust enough. Studies suggest that the actual death toll due to heatwaves is far higher than what is often reported. Several heat-related deaths are unrecognised or misclassified as often only the immediate medical cause gets recorded, and the role of heat as a trigger is seldom acknowledged. It’s a similar situation as people with comorbidities being infected by Covid-19 and resulting in death.
Several, including Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Tripura (to name a few), have notified heat as a state-specific disaster. This allows them to extend relief measures for those affected by heat and compensation for heat-related deaths. However, at a national level, the scale of resources needed for such relief and compensation measures would be significantly higher, This may be one reason why heat has not yet been notified as a disaster at the national level.
Uma: Unlike other sudden-onset disasters, heatwaves build up and expand over a large part of the country at varying intensities, requiring short, medium and long-term structural solutions to reduce the increasing, cumulative risks. This makes it difficult to classify excess deaths caused by heatwave exposure accurately. Moreover, without proper surveillance, many morbidities such as cardiac arrest can be misclassified as the cause of death rather than the root cause of the problem, such as extreme temperatures.
How much money do you estimate we need for heat action?
Uma: Official estimates indicate that India needs a cumulative expenditure of Rs 56.68 trillion till 2030 to implement the country’s adaptation efforts, including heat action, in a business-as- usual scenario. After accounting for the country’s developmental needs and climate-induced pressures, the need for building adaptation capital stock could be as high as Rs 72 trillion. India also faces substantially high economic costs of inaction.
Nihal: Most of the current heat action is concentrated on short-term relief and basic preparedness – measures like early warnings, public advisories, and water kiosks. These are important, but they primarily aim to reduce immediate exposure rather than address systemic vulnerabilities. As a result, heat action plans tend to be reactive and focused on emergency response, with limited investment in long-term resilience.
How is financing flowing currently for heat action? Is it transparent?
Nihal: Despite the growing number of heat action plans across cities and states, financing remains a major weak point A review of HAPs found that only a handful of them in the country identified specific sources of finance for any of their interventions. Outside of generic budgetary provisions there is little clarity on how heat resilience is actually being funded. Although the 2005 Act provided for a disaster mitigation fund, it was only operationalised nationally in 2020 following the 15th Finance Commission’s recommendation. Kerala remains one of the few states that had a functioning mitigation fund even before that.
There’s also untapped potential to align heat action with existing centrally sponsored schemes. Flagship programs like AMRUT, Smart Cities Mission, or urban employment schemes could support structural and livelihood-based heat resilience — but these synergies remain largely unexplored.
In states where heat is a notified disaster, SDRF does offer some flexibility – for example, gram panchayats can access Rs 2 lakhs for setting up cooling centres or water kiosks. But what’s really needed is a shift towards financing mechanisms that supports a comprehensive set of heat resilience measures. Without stronger integration of heat risk into planning and public finance systems, we’ll continue to see fragmented and short-term responses.
Uma: Public investments in heat action include various schemes that build heat resilience, directly or indirectly. The National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change (NAFCC), launched in 2015, was initially a key vehicle for climate adaptation, with some projects addressing heat stress through drought resilience or climate-smart village planning. More recently, funding patterns have shifted, and multiple programmes such as the NAFCC are yet to receive additional funding. The other scheme Mission Mausam which was introduced in September last year aims to establish an extensive weather monitoring infrastructure, which could be a positive step in heatwave tracking and prediction.
India’s social protection schemes don’t explicitly target heatwave impacts, but programmes like PM Jan Arogya Yojana cover related health issues such as dehydration and heatstroke. The eSanjeevani initiative enables medical access through teleconsultation, which can reduce heat exposure and facilitate adaptation actions.
Have arguments for heat financing shifted from tapping into existing government schemes to include more private financing options?
Nihal: I don’t think there is a lot of private funding flowing into heat action. I have come across instances wherein philanthropies or CSR-arm of companies are funding cooling centres or setting up water kiosks, or in some cities, there is a public-private partnership for initiatives like making bus and bus stops air conditioned. But there is no organised effort.
Uma: Yes, there has undoubtedly been a shift from relying solely on public finance. The COP28 Call for Collaboration in 2023 emphasised the need for private-sector mobilisation for adaptation, noting that public funds alone could only meet 11–21% of developing nations’ climate finance needs. This aligned with India’s revised Nationally Determined Contributions, which identified an investment gap of $1.5 trillion in the cooling-sector. The Sustana Cooling India Fund blended $100 million from development finance institutions, philanthropies, and impact investors to scale startups like EcoZen’s solar cold chains. The introduction of the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme and tradeable cooling efficiency certificates has created further incentives for the private sector. With extreme heat projected to cut India’s GDP by 4.5% by 2030, corporate interest in the sector has surged.
Now we’re seeing different blended finance structures: SEWA partnered with Arsht-Rock to launch parametric heat insurance covering 50,000 women; ventures like Inficold (solar refrigeration) and ClimaRanQ (heat-resistant crops) have attracted $23 million in venture capital since 2022; ReMaterials developed ‘ModRoof’, an affordable roofing solution which costs 40-50% less than concrete slab roofs.
The future of heat funding in India should be multi-dimensional, combining public-private partnerships, legal accountability – including operationalising the ‘Polluter Pays’ principle – and a decentralised, vulnerability-responsive approach.
Is there any scope to tap global funds?
Nihal: That’s tricky. The loss and damage fund is still in its early stages of being operational at the global level. The jury is out on how accessible the fund will be for countries like India. It is possible that the fund will prioritise small island developing states and low-income countries, who face acute and existential threats.
Also, step one to accessing funds is having an aggregated database of loss and damage during disasters, but the current mechanism we have, like the National Disaster Management Information System (NDMIS), is not robust enough. For instance, the 2018 Kerala floods is perhaps the first time that India conducted a comprehensive post-disaster needs assessment The NDMA is currently working on a framework to ascertain loss and damage. This framework is still in its early stages, and it remains to be seen if heat-related losses will be captured.
How important is it to collect better data on occupational and income-related losses?
Apekshita: We do have basic figures on income, which can be used to estimate compensation. By correlating income with the number of heatwave days and temperature extremes, it’s possible to back-calculate lost wages and offer fair restitution for hours of work missed. It’s not just a question of income-related losses but also about increased expenditure because of cooling requirements, increased food preservation and transportation costs, and higher medical expenditures.
Nihal: Yes but compensation for income-related loss cannot be based on a uniform national benchmark; it must be calibrated to local contexts, reflecting variations in the nature of the hazard (heat in this case) and prevailing wage rates across different geographies. “Another thing about heat insurance: the only intervention I know of is the one that SEWA does in Gujarat, but I think it is working right now because it’s being operationalised at a very small scale. But in a warming world where such events and impacts are predicted to increase, the feasibility of interventions like insurance is questionable. After the Los Angeles fires earlier this year, people had renters insurance and home insurance, and then the industry collapsed there because everybody was impacted, and you don’t have the wherewithal to be able to make such payments.
Heat Action Plans take a ‘zero casualty’ approach by focusing on heat-related deaths, but loss and damage happen in other ways – such as women undergoing uterus removal or miscarriage. Is it possible for heat funding to support impacts that are not economically quantifiable?
Uma: Yes, it is imperative to recognise that heat-related impacts go beyond mortality statistics. Women, especially in impoverished living conditions, face uneven heat risks due to extended exposure to indoor heat stress, compounded by a lack of clean cooking and cross-ventilation inside their homes. We have to go beyond a zero-casualty approach to support broader adaptive measures that strengthen maternal and reproductive health systems and provide broader developmental benefits, especially for women in high-exposure occupations or areas.
Although not climate-targeted, models like the one followed by Utkrisht Impact Bond in Rajasthan improved maternal and neonatal outcomes through quality-of-care investments. Similar outcome-based financing models could be adapted for climate-sensitive health outcomes, enabling heat funding to support critical, underreported dimensions of loss and damage. Further, schemes like Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana could emphasise passive cooling design techniques and affordable building materials that could reduce indoor heat stress.
Apekshita: It is very important to have a ‘casualty’ focus. India currently records the highest number of heatstroke deaths globally, and without integrating an intersectional lens, we risk allowing heat to escalate into a full-blown public health crisis. There are increased instances of hysterectomies, menstrual irregularities, cataracts, of people developing kidney stones, of cardiovascular challenges – these are linked to heat, but we don’t currently have the evidence, and we are not making attempts to study the health impact. We’re also overlooking indoor workers: MSME employees, textile and platform workers, and home-based women labourers like agarbatti makers, who suffer despite not being directly exposed to the sun. Looking at this from the perspective of economics or fatality is very limiting.
Nihal: Heat is often called a silent killer and an invisible hazard. Even for more visible disasters like floods or cyclones, there are no funding mechanisms for non-economic loss and damage. In an ideal scenario, we should be thinking about non-economic L&D.In the case of heat, at the national level, compensation for heat-related deaths is not a reality, so the funding mechanism for non-economic loss and damages is still a long way away.
What role can the law play in strengthening our heat financing infrastructure? EU regulations hold retailers like H&M and Nike liable for funding factory cooling services and protect workers from heat stress.
Nihal: One way is to notify heat as a disaster — that itself would enable access to SDRF and NDRF funds. There’s no reason existing legislation can’t be used more effectively to strengthen heat governance. Disaster management plans already draw their legitimacy from the Disaster Management Act, and this legal framework includes provisions to hold officials accountable for implementation failures. Yet, these mechanisms are rarely invoked when it comes to heat action.
If heat is a notified disaster, then orders can be passed and violations scrutinised accordingly. HAPs, though not enforceable, include common advisories—like adjusting work hours during peak heat—which are often implemented through the labour department during the heat season. Enforcement is uneven but there are good examples. In Kerala, for instance, if a heat warning is issued and if workers are caught working on construction sites, then the employer/ builder/contractor are fined heavily and they have to suspend work for a week or so. The challenge is that the labour department cannot enforce this across all construction sites as they are short-staffed. In some cases, the public helps by sending violation photos to labour officers, prompting action.
Uma: Amending labour laws or enacting new occupational safety regulations could drive enforcement of heat protection standards, budget allocation, and interdepartmental coordination. For example, updating the Factories Act and Shops and Establishments Act to mandate cooling, rest areas, and heat safety protocols for all workers, including informal ones. Companies, especially in high-heat sectors, could be required to invest in heat adaptation. Or introducing liability for supply chain working conditions, similar to EU due diligence laws, so that brands and contractors are responsible for worker safety throughout their operations.
One of the concerns is the potential impact on the bottom line of MSMEs, which are the largest employers of informal workers. Pushback against such legislation will likely come from trade bodies. Any impact on MSMEs’ cost structures can subsequently impact wages, economic growth, and employment of informal workers. Hence, instead of binding legislation, it is important to incentivise MSMEs through concessional financing mechanisms to create awareness initially, and subsequently follow up with legislation.
Are there case studies from other countries where heat financing has focused on vulnerable communities?
Uma: After the deadly 2021 ‘Heat Dome’ event, Vancouver began using targeted grants to support its most heat-vulnerable residents. Through the Resilient Neighbourhoods Program, it partners with community and disability organisations to distribute cooling kits, air filters, and provide accessible cooling services. In California, the Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program prioritises equity, focusing on historically underinvested communities. Sierra Leone’s ‘Freetown the Treetown’ is a pay-to-grow scheme where residents are paid to plant and monitor geotagged trees. They receive ‘impact tokens’ sold on carbon markets, generating revenue to fund the programme and provide community income.
Is there a need or way to reverse this approach, and empower local governments to decide how money flows?
Nihal: I believe this would lead to better fund disbursal. In Kerala, the Local Self Government Department is tasked with proposing mid- to long-term heat action, based on the idea that local bodies best understand local risks and solutions. The challenge there lies in capacities — local self governments might not have the capabilities or resources to do local vulnerability assessments. With city or state governments, you have research organisations or consultants or project management units (PMUs), but this might not be the case for all local governments. There’s a clear capacity gap that must be addressed through support and training.
The absence of strong local governance also creates a disconnect between what people want and need, and shapes how interventions are framed. We think of heat that comes during the summer months and not as a consequence of the longer drawn impact of climate change. Most HAPs have categorised heat and heat action as pre heat, heat, and post heat, but heat as a hazard is more nuanced than that. Overall, temperatures are increasing, ‘heat season’ as we commonly understood is shifting. When we create these distinctions, it leads to actions being very sporadic in nature and concentrated only for a certain time period. We are not looking at mid- to long-term action such as looking at the way cities are planned and built.
Apekshita: We also need to be thinking critically of the lowest level of governance, be it the municipality or zilla parishad or panchayat. Our surveys show many still lack access to portable water, clean washrooms, or green cover like parks, where the primary responsibility lies with municipal corporations. Without the right amount of funding and leadership within these spaces, they are not going to be able to make any drastic changes to our cities or workplace.
A Workers’ Collective Report called for setting up an L&D fund at a local government level. Is it possible to think of a community driven or labour rights perspective?
Uma: Embedding community voices into planning and budgeting can ensure that funds reach those most vulnerable, such as outdoor workers, women, and marginalised communities, and support practical solutions like water stations, shade, or heat insurance. Participatory budgeting models from other countries – such as Porto Alegre in Brazil – in other sectors can offer a strong precedent. Decentralised, data-driven decision-making ensures that resources flow to where they are needed most, empowering local governments and communities.
Apekshita: A heat corpus can serve as an emergency fund to cover income loss and rising expenses, but it’s not a holistic solution. A parallel to that is the Building and Other Construction Worker Welfare (BoCW) fund – there is enough and more evidence about that not being used for their welfare.
Some of these challenges are a labour rights issue. Looking at heat from a labour rights perspective is helpful because we’re able to think about the people who are engaged in this kind of work and secure livelihoods. Dedicated funding is vital not just as a stopgap solution but a holistic way of creating social protection nets. It is also a way of redefining ‘work’ environments, thinking not only of a construction site or factory but also to account for cities, peri-urban towns and villages where people step out and where daily life and work unfold in the open.