India is rapidly getting hotter, but not all at once. Heat waves are extremely detrimental to people’s health, not just affecting the environment. The country is no longer confronting climate change as a distant environmental concern. The crisis has become immediate, physical, and deeply unequal. From the plains of North India to the coastal belts of the South, prolonged spells of extreme heat are altering everyday life, impacting labour productivity, straining infrastructure, and increasing public health emergencies. But behind this crisis is a hidden reality that most people don’t see: women carry a disproportionate and highly gendered burden of heat stress. Only very recently have policy frameworks begun to acknowledge the gendered health impacts of heat waves in India, ranging from reproductive health risks to occupational exposure.
Women’s bodies respond differently to heat stress at a physiological level. Hormonal fluctuations, body composition, and metabolic rates all affect thermoregulation, making women more susceptible to dehydration, fatigue, and heat-related illness. Pregnant women face even greater risks due to the additional physiological demands placed on the body during pregnancy. In rural and peri-urban areas where access to prenatal care is limited, heat waves add to the challenges faced by already fragile maternal health systems. Extreme heat causes premature births, low birth weight, stillbirths, and problems for the mother. Studies across India show more bad outcomes for pregnancies as temperatures rise, especially in places where there’s no cooling infrastructure or adequate health care.
The relationship between heat waves and women’s health in India is a matter under-discussed in mainstream climate policy. Much of the public conversation continues to frame heat waves as meteorological or environmental events, focusing mainly on temperature, water shortage, and energy demand. However, extreme heat is also a profound public health challenge that intersects with gender, poverty, labour, housing, and healthcare access. Women experience heat differently due to physiological, occupational, and socio-economic factors, making them vulnerable. There is a need to rethink how heat vulnerability is conceptualised as India attempts to build climate resilience infrastructure. Women cannot be considered an “invisible category” within climate governance. Thus, heat waves are not only rewriting environmental realities in India; they are also rewriting the landscape of women’s health risks.
India has emerged as one of the world’s most heat-vulnerable countries. The India Meteorological Department has repeatedly recorded longer and intense heat wave periods in recent years. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), South Asia is warming faster than the global average, increasing the frequency of extreme heat events. Such conditions should be treated with dignity, as they are embedded in India’s climate reality.
Urbanisation, deforestation, declining groundwater levels, and the urban heat island effect are adding up to the ongoing crisis. Dense cities like Kolkata, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad suffer from enhanced night temperatures due to concrete infrastructure and little green cover that inhibits physiological recovery from daytime exposure to heat. Meanwhile, rural vulnerability is evident in water scarcity, agricultural distress and limited access to health services.
Historically, heat waves were measured in terms of mortality statistics. But the long-term health consequences of prolonged heat exposure are just as important. The results are increasingly common: heat exhaustion, dehydration, cardiovascular strain, kidney disorders, mental stress and reduced work capacity.
Women in the informal sector are especially vulnerable to the effects of rising temperatures. Millions of women in India are employed as farm labourers, street sellers, domestic workers, sanitation workers, construction workers, and manufacturing workers, sometimes in situations with minimal access to cooling, shade, or healthcare. These sectors, unlike formal workplaces, lack heat protection policies or flexible work arrangements. Many women continue working in bad weather because if they miss a day’s pay, they may not be able to keep their family alive.
This strain is apparent in agricultural activity. Women’s participation in sowing, harvesting, taking care of animals, and collecting water is growing in rural India. Long-term outdoor exposure during heat waves increases the risk of dehydration, heatstroke, and chronic tiredness. In many drought-prone states, women have to cover longer distances to fetch domestic water due to reduced availability of water, increasing their physical exposure to hazardous temperatures. Heat stress thus exacerbates existing gender inequalities in unpaid care work and in rural work.
For city women the reality is different, but no less brutal. Housing in low-income settlements and informal settlements is often characterised by tin roofs, poor ventilation and limited electricity. Indoor temperatures in such populations can reach deadly levels, especially at night, when heat is trapped in dense urban structures. Even though the public discourse is mostly about outdoor temperatures, women, especially homemakers, the elderly women and caregivers, who spend more time indoors, are always at risk of heat stress.
There is also a growing mental health dimension to the heat epidemic that has largely been overlooked in policy debates. Long periods of exposure to heat have been associated with anxiety, disrupted sleep, emotional stress and increased psychological distress across the world. Women doing domestic chores under deteriorating environmental conditions are often emotionally exhausted due to climate stress. Food insecurity, water scarcity, care-giving responsibilities and income insecurity are worsening the invisible burden women bear during climate catastrophes.
India has, no doubt, begun adapting to high heat through Heat Action Plans in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Nagpur. These strategies have improved early warning systems, public awareness campaigns and emergency response processes. While heat sensitivity is strongly gendered, most heat policies are still developed in a gender-neutral way. Public cooling centres, health advisories and labour laws often do not meet the needs of pregnant women, informal women workers and women living in high density settlements. Infrastructure continues to be prioritised to the detriment of socioeconomic vulnerability in climate adaptation programs.
This policy vacuum exposes a more general problem of climate governance. Women are often cited as vulnerable groups; however, they are seldom placed at the centre of climate planning and decision-making. Women are not just victims of climate stress; they are also central to adaptation and resilience. Women-led self-help groups, local health workers and community networks are already playing major roles in water access management, health awareness and local climate responses in many parts of India. Integrating these networks into heat adaption techniques can greatly increase community resilience.
Women’s health needs to be part of the climate resiliency conversation. Heat waves are an example of environmental disasters exacerbating existing inequalities in gender, labour, housing, health care and poverty. Adaptation efforts will fail if India’s climate policies do not tackle these interlocking vulnerabilities.
The climate catastrophe is no longer an abstract scientific projection. It’s happening in overcrowded homes, hospital wards, agricultural fields and city streets, where women are paying the hidden cost of rising heat. India’s future climate resilience will thus depend not just on cooling cities and upgrading infrastructure, but also on the country’s ability to build a public healthcare system that recognises heat as a highly gendered disaster.
Preethi Lolaksha Nagaveni is a legal academic and human rights scholar specialising in public law, caste discrimination, gender justice, modern slavery, and global health law. Her research has contributed to UN human rights processes and has been cited by UK parliamentary committees and UN bodies.
Amit Anand is an independent human rights researcher with a PhD in Law from Lancaster University, UK. His research engages with questions of human rights, gender justice, and socio-legal understandings of violence and vulnerability.
Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher with experience in political analysis, ESG research, and energy policy.
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth