Why India's heat action plans aren't cooling cities

• Short-term remedies drive response
• Cities lack dedicated budgets to tackle heat
• Two-thirds of Indians at risk of extreme heat

NEW DELHI - India's punishingly hot summer has cast a harsh light on its efforts to contend with extreme heat, with researchers and campaigners worried local governments are failing to grapple with the scale and complexity of rising temperatures.

Summer, which usually lasts from March to June in India, began early this year with an unprecedented heatwave in February, followed by above-normal temperatures in March and April, before an early monsoon season and heavy rainfall brought temporary relief.

Heat Action Plans (HAPs), first introduced in 2013, are India's primary policy response to hotter temperatures that pose threats to public health, food security and outdoor workers.

But a pair of recent studies showed that most Indian cities are still relying on low-cost fixes, while long-term measures remain underfunded, uncoordinated or entirely absent.

Local "governments are acknowledging heat as a problem," said Aditya Valiathan Pillai, co-author of an analysis of cities' responses to extreme heat published by Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC) think tank in March.

"But they have no imagination of what long-term climate resilience even looks like."

No transformation

More than half of Indian urban and rural districts, which are home to more 76% of the population, or more than 1 billion people, are now at high or very high risk from extreme heat, according to a May study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a New Delhi-based think-tank.

The central government has encouraged local governments to adopt HAPs, with more than 250 cities and districts in 23 heat-prone states devising the plans, although it is not mandatory.

Nine-high risk cities, including New Delhi, Bhopal, Kolkata and Varanasi, that were surveyed by SFC reported 150 heat-related measures between 2018 and 2023, but most were seasonal or after heatwaves had struck, including setting up water stations, changing school schedules and issuing advisories.

Redesigning built environments and other long-term solutions were rare and were focused on healthcare, like training hospital staff or tracking heat deaths, SFC found.

Transformative steps such as erecting climate-sensitive housing were largely absent, the study said.

India's densest and poorest areas are often excluded from cooling efforts tree-planting or water-body restoration because of land ownership and infrastructure challenges, said Pillai.

"You end up with greenery on the outskirts, not where it's needed," he said.

Selomi Garnaik, a campaigner with Greenpeace India, said many HAPs "lack targeted investments or meaningful shifts in infrastructure and governance."

The plans were often created top-down with little community input, and heat is still viewed as mainly a health issue "when it actually intersects with labour rights, housing and urban planning," she said.

The National Disaster Management Authority, as well as the agencies responsible for HAPs in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra states did not respond to requests for comment. None of the city officials contacted by Context agreed to an interview.

Little public pressure

A study by Yale University in the United States in 2023 found 71% of nearly 11,000 Indians surveyed had experienced severe heatwaves in the previous year and 56% were "very worried" about heat as the climate changes.

Most of the respondents supported national action, like shifting to clean energy, rather than measures at the local level.

This may discourage local politicians from expending money and labour on longer-term strategies, Pillai said.

But India has begun setting aside more money for heat.

In 2024, heatwaves were formally made eligible for project-based funding under the State Disaster Mitigation Fund, which has 320 billion rupees ($3.71 billion) to cover disasters between 2021 and 2026.

Accessing these monies remains limited, partly because the fund's guidelines are still being finalised, said Vishwas Chitale, a climate resilience researcher at CEEW.

City planners must "treat heat like a long-term design problem, not just an emergency," he said.

He pointed to Chennai, a city of 6.8 million people on India's southeast coast, where officials used district-level heat-risk data to decide where to build parks and bodies of water as part of its 20 year city master plan.

But experts said a holistic approach to deal with ever-rising temperatures in India is still missing.

"I am still waiting to see a city that does it all: short term and long term measures, legally backed, publicly engaged and fully implemented," said Pillai.

($1 = 86.3660 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Bhasker Tripathi; Editing by Ayla Jean Yackley.)