After the mercury touched 48.2°C in Sri Ganganagar on May 27, 2026, making it the hottest spot on the planet, North India got a brief respite brought by rain and gusty winds. But now the region continues to grapple with intense June heat. The temperatures are above the 40-degree mark, making afternoons uncomfortable and forcing many people to limit outdoor activities.
This is even when the weather conditions across the country are presenting a mixed picture with the advancement of the southwest monsoon into parts of the Bay of Bengal and the northeast.
India's heatwave season of 2026 arrived with unusual ferocity. At its peak, all 50 of the world's hottest cities were located within India, with Uttar Pradesh alone accounting for 26 of them. The arc of suffering stretched across the country from Vidarbha to the northern plains. Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan all recorded temperatures between 45°C and 48°C. Warm nights compounded the misery, offering no recovery from the daytime heat.
The strain showed on the grid too where peak power demand set fresh records on four consecutive days in May, touching an all-time high of 270.82 GW on May 21, surpassing the previous all-time high of around 250 GW recorded in May 2024, and closely matching the Union Ministry of Power's own summer projection of 270 GW. The summers of 2026, 2025 and 2024 together tell the story of a climate tipping point being crossed in real time. Each year has been as brutal as the last and in some respects, more so.
The warning signs were already visible in 2025. On February 25, Goa and Maharashtra recorded India's first heatwave of the year. It was also the first time in recorded history that a heatwave had occurred during the winter season — an unprecedented meteorological event, described the India Meteorological Department (IMD).
The summer that followed broke multiple historical temperature records across the subcontinent. The heatwave arrived well ahead of the typical May–June window, peaking at 48°C in Sri Ganganagar on 12 June, and reached so far beyond its familiar geography that even Assam and the Himalayan states reported fatalities indicating of how dramatically the heat frontier had shifted.
The year 2024, however, served as the most devastating wake-up call yet. Between March and June, India experienced record-breaking temperatures, with 37 cities surpassing 45°C. Churu district in Rajasthan recorded 50.5°C, which was the highest temperature measured anywhere in India in eight years. At least 23 places across Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh breached 45°C on a single day, prompting IMD to issue red warnings across the entire northwest. The nights offered no relief either.
The National Programme on Climate Change and Human Health (NPCHH) noted that severe warm nights were concentrated across northern India particularly in Chandigarh, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
Between June 15 and 18, each of these regions endured four consecutive severe warm nights, with minimum temperatures soaring 4–7°C above normal, denying the human body the overnight recovery window it critically needs. In Alwar, Rajasthan, the night temperature on June 18 reached 37°C, the highest minimum temperature in the district in 55 years.
Heatwaves are often referred to as a "silent killer", gradually claiming lives without the immediate visibility of floods or earthquakes. A heatwave is understood as an abrupt and sustained increase in land surface temperature significantly above normal, persisting for several days in succession. IMD data and peer-reviewed research confirm that all three dimensions — frequency, duration and intensity — have worsened over recent decades.
Between 1981 and 2000, affected regions experienced an average of 2.5-5.5 heatwave days per year; by 2001–2020, this had risen to 3.5-8.5 days, now spanning a far wider geography. The average duration of heatwaves has increased by 6.5 days over seven decades, with intensity rising most sharply across northern India. Two zones bear the greatest burden: Northwest India, where heatwave duration is growing by 1.3 days per decade, and the southeast coast of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.
The growing frequency, intensity, duration and earlier onset of extreme heat and the severe public health consequences that follow underline the urgent need to strengthen adaptation at every level. This response must be holistic, integrating traditional community-based practices with coordinated institutional and governmental action.
Long before heat action plans and government advisories, India's communities had developed their own climate wisdom which was quietly sophisticated, locally rooted, and often more effective than modern interventions acknowledge. From the desert settlements of Rajasthan to the rural heartlands of Maharashtra and the dry northern districts of Karnataka, each region evolved a coherent response to extreme heat, in how it built, what it ate, and how it organised the rhythms of daily life.
In architecture, the ingenuity was remarkable. Rajasthan's thick sandstone walls, jaalis, and courtyard layouts minimised heat gain, while its baolis (stepwells) that created natural microclimates several degrees cooler than the surrounding air, served simultaneously as water sources and communal retreats.
In Karnataka's hot northern districts around Kalaburagi, vernacular buildings relied on courtyard orientation, roof projections and layouts designed to channel prevailing winds and minimise direct solar gain.
Maharashtra's contribution was simpler but no less effective: The matka, an unglazed earthen pot that kept water several degrees below ambient temperature through natural evaporation, served as the primary household cooling technology across rural communities for generations.
Food and drink formed an equally important line of defense, and here too the regions spoke in different dialects of the same wisdom. Rajasthan turned to rabri, thandai, aam panna, and bajra light, cooling, and restorative in nature. Maharashtra relied on mattha, buttermilk spiced with cumin and mint, alongside aam panna for electrolyte replenishment.
Karnataka offered neer mor, its own version of spiced buttermilk, to outdoor workers and visitors during summer serving less as hospitality than as a survival protocol, a distinction Karnataka's own state climate action plan has since formally recognised.
What united all three regions and communities across the subcontinent was a shared behavioural discipline that no policy document has ever needed to mandate. Between noon and four in the afternoon, streets emptied, fields fell silent, and the social rhythm of the day re-organised itself around shade. Farming, trading, and travel were completed before sunrise or deferred to dusk. This instinctive contraction of outdoor activity during peak heat hours was not laziness rather it was accumulated ecological wisdom, passed down through generations who understood that surviving the heat was, above all, a matter of timing.
Further the transition from community coping to formal governance began with a catastrophe, bringing several Heat Wave action plans. India now has over a hundred Heat Action Plans at state, district and municipal levels.
Odisha was the first to implement one in 1999, following 2,042 deaths in the preceding year's heatwave. Ahmedabad's city-level plan, launched in 2013, became a model studied internationally. By 2017, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra had all produced state-level plans. The NDMA issued national guidelines in 2016. Over 130 cities and districts across 23 heat-prone states now nominally have plans.
Much like the traditional practices that preceded them, these formal action plans sought to make communities more adaptive to extreme heat. The Ahmedabad plan, in particular, drew on behavioural principles already embedded in local life, such as public cooling centers echoing the communal function of the baoli, restrictions on outdoor labour during peak afternoon hours mirroring the age-old practice of midday rest, and mass distribution of oral rehydration salts recalling the folk logic of buttermilk and aam panna.
Other cities and states followed with their own plans, each attempting to codify, institutionalise, and scale what communities had once practiced instinctively. Yet, despite centuries of traditional wisdom and decades of evolving heat action plans, a persistent implementation gap remains, and it demands an approach that is transformational rather than merely administrative, both at the level of policy formulation and ground-level delivery.
A genuinely effective heat governance framework must integrate meteorological early warning, community-level behavioural outreach, urban planning reform, and occupational health protections into a unified, year-round system, one rooted as much in local knowledge as in institutional capacity. This means, concretely, bringing time-tested cooling practices such as the jaali, the matka, and the shaded courtyard into modern building codes and urban design guidelines, not as aesthetic flourishes, but as evidence-based climate responses.
Central to this transformation is the formal recognition of heatwaves as notified disasters under the Disaster Management Act, a step that would unlock dedicated funding, establish legal accountability, and create a structured basis for inter-agency response.
Equally important is a fuller alignment with the NDMA's own mandate of a preparedness-first approach, shifting the institutional posture from reactive relief to anticipatory action. The earth is warming, and India is bearing the worst of it. With each passing summer, heatwaves arrive earlier, last longer and kill more.
A Harvard-supported white paper from April 2026 put it plainly: Extreme heat is the world's deadliest climate hazard, yet among its least-funded. After three consecutive summers of record-breaking heat — in 2024, 2025, and 2026 — that finding should give every policymaker pause. Some plans are in place. Some must be revised. And some must still be farmed from scratch — rooted in an approach that looks inward as much as it looks forward, that governs with new tools in one hand and the memory of what once kept us cool in the other.
Milap Punia is the vice-chancellor of Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, Haryana, and professor at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Vandana Choudhary is with the Special Centre for Disaster Research, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.