Indian agricultural workers lost an average of 648 hours, or 54 full working days, to heat stress in 2024, a UK-based analysis says.
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit found that total heat-related working hours lost across India’s agricultural workforce rose sharply over the past decade.
India ranked third among 15 climate-vulnerable countries studied for heat-induced agricultural labour losses, after Ghana and Vietnam.
A possible Super El Niño could intensify heat risks in 2026 and 2027, adding to baseline global warming and worsening conditions for outdoor workers.
The report warns that rising heat stress could deepen income insecurity, disrupt agricultural labour and affect food production.
An Indian farm worker lost an average of 648 working hours to heat stress in 2024, the hottest year recorded since modern temperature records began. That is the equivalent of 54 full days of labour wiped out by extreme heat conditions severe enough to make work physically impossible.
The findings of an analysis by the United Kingdom-based non-profit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) show how extreme heat is increasingly making outdoor work physically difficult or unsafe, particularly for agricultural labourers who are paid by the day or according to output.
As temperatures rise, workers may be forced to reduce hours, take longer breaks or stop work altogether to avoid heat-related illness. For daily-wage farm workers, every hour lost to extreme heat can mean lost income and greater risk to health, livelihoods and household security. What makes this figure all the more alarming is what lies ahead.
Scientists have warned that a powerful Super El Niño is now 80 per cent likely to develop and interact with the underlying trend of global warming, raising the risk of even more extreme temperatures over the coming months. According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2027 is projected to become the hottest year on record, with the combined effects of El Niño and human-induced climate change pushing temperatures into unprecedented territory.
The numbers, tracked over a decade by ECIU, showed that total hours lost to heat stress across India’s workforce reached 163.3 million in 2024 — up 16.7 per cent from 2022 and an astonishing 45.4 per cent from 2014.
The long-term trend shows no sign of levelling off, with about 4.5 additional hours per worker being lost each year on average.
The impact is compounded by a rise in agricultural employment in India. Agricultural employment increased by 8.6 per cent since 2022 and 22.6 per cent since 2014, meaning more workers than ever were spending more hours than ever exposed to conditions that the World Health Organisation describes as a direct physiological assault on the body, one that can lead to exhaustion, heatstroke and, at its most extreme cases, death.
At a time when real wage growth has remained weak for many low-income Indian households, lost working hours can deepen financial hardship and push vulnerable families further into poverty. The consequences could also extend beyond individual workers, with disruption to agricultural labour affecting food production and food security for a country where the window of normal weather is anyway rapidly shrinking.
India faced extreme weather events on 331 of 334 days between January and November 2025, according to an analysis by Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment and Down To Earth.
India was among the 15 countries examined in the ECIU study, which assessed how heat stress in key climate-vulnerable food-producing nations could affect food supplies to the UK. The analysis measured the number of working hours lost to extreme heat across the 15 countries most critical to the UK's food imports — India, Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam, Ivory Coast, Peru, Colombia, Kenya, Egypt, Ecuador, Argentina, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico and Papua New Guinea.
These countries are highly exposed to climate risks and together supplied £8.9 billion, or 13 per cent of UK food imports.
India was the third hardest-hit country for heat-induced agricultural labour loss among the 15 countries, after Ghana and Vietnam. The wider finding was that agricultural workers across these countries lost an estimated 216 billion hours to heat stress in 2024. That is equivalent to around 590 hours per worker across an agricultural workforce of 366 million people.
The figure has risen sharply from 394 hours per worker lost to heat in 1990, with losses increasing by about four additional hours per worker each year on average.
“In recent years, the pace appears to have accelerated, with closer to five additional hours lost per worker each year. This highlights the growing threat that extreme heat poses to agricultural production in countries the UK relies on for food,” the report said.
The study calculated working hours lost using climate measures, population distribution and estimates of the proportion of people employed in particular sectors. The findings drew on research published in the 2025 Lancet Countdown report on health and climate change, one of the most comprehensive annual assessments of how a warming planet was affecting human health and welfare.
The methodology used wet-bulb globe temperature, a measure that gives a more realistic estimate of heat stress on the human body than a standard thermometer reading. Wet-bulb globe temperature combines air temperature, humidity, radiant heat from the sun and dry air temperature, along with wind. It gives a better idea of what a human body is actually experiencing, and critically, of how effectively it can cool itself.
Work Hours Lost (WHL) was calculated assuming a 12-hour working day, seven days per week, centred on solar noon, when heat stress is typically highest. In many regions, air temperature and wet-bulb globe temperature peak several hours after solar midday, and most estimated losses occur during this period, the analysis said.