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Extreme heat is now a nationally notified disaster in India, but workers like Raja, a Delhi street vendor, show how policy still ignores their daily reality.
They endure dangerous daytime temperatures and sleepless nights in overheated informal homes, losing income when they cut hours.
Experts urge worker-centred heat plans, enforceable safety standards and income protection.
“My sleep is majorly affected by heat because our room becomes very hot. To cope with it, I take the fan to the terrace. But there are too many mosquitoes on the terrace, because of which I am not able to sleep properly.”
This is an entry in Raja’s Garmi Khata, or heat register. Raja is a street vendor in Delhi and one of several workers documenting their everyday experience of extreme heat through maintaining a register. The register is an effort to create a record of how heat affects health, income, livelihood, household expenses, sleep and everyday life. Another entry from Raja says: “No matter how hot it gets, work still has to be done. However, to protect ourselves from the heat, we sometimes close the shop for one or two hours in the afternoon.”
These two entries tell us a two-fold crisis of heat that workers are forced to face: the first is about work in the extreme heat conditions and the second is about living in an informal settlement during the increasing night temperature and humidity. And together, they reveal a cycle that is still missing from much of India’s heat response.
Recent studies identified the alarming new risks of increasing night temperature and humidity across cities. We often talk about outdoor workers being exposed to extreme heat during the day. But the same worker who spends hours working under the sun may return to an informal settlement where homes are small, poorly ventilated and remain unbearably hot through the night. Electricity costs could also make prolonged use of cooling mechanisms unaffordable. This means their body does not get the recovery time it needs before another day of physical labour begins.
For workers engaged in demanding physical work, adequate recovery is essential for their health and safety. Rising night-time temperatures are adding another layer to an already dangerous situation. Raja’s story is not an isolated story of one individual worker. It reflects what is increasingly happening to millions of workers, particularly those employed in India’s informal economy. However, the current heat action responses are only focused on daytime temperatures.
On August 4, the Indian government informed Parliament that heatwave has been formally added to India’s list of nationally notified disasters. This creates an important opportunity to ask a more fundamental question: if heat is a disaster, what does that recognition mean for the person who has to work through it to survive? The reports suggest that more than 380 million workers in India are exposed to hazardous occupational heat levels every year, representing around 75 per cent of the workforce. Agriculture, construction, street vending, sanitation, transport, delivery work and other informal occupations are among those facing sustained exposure to extreme heat and humidity.
It’s becoming increasingly evident that heat is no longer a ‘natural calamity’ but it is an economic disaster and public health crisis. Heat stress reduces physical capacity, and productivity. It increases the risk of dehydration, heat exhaustion, heat stroke and workplace injuries. For a worker dependent on daily wages, even reducing working hours by two or three hours can immediately translate into income loss.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 2.4 billion workers globally are exposed to excessive heat. The World Bank has projected that extreme heat is already costing the South Asia region nearly the equivalent of 31 million full-time jobs each year and could reduce South Asia’s economy by nearly 7 per cent by 2050. The burden will fall disproportionately on informal and low-income workers like Raja, who often have the least control over working hours and conditions and almost no mechanisms to absorb lost income. Therefore, we have to put workers at the centre of India’s heat response plans and strengthen the existing occupational safety framework accordingly.
International organisations like the World Health Organization, ILO and World Meteorological Organization have already developed practical solutions including heat exposure assessment, Wet Bulb Globe Temperature or WBGT monitoring, hydration, work-rest cycles, acclimatisation, early warning systems and protection of vulnerable workers. However, India’s current occupational safety framework does not yet explicitly and comprehensively recognise extreme heat as an occupational hazard, nor does it establish sufficiently specific standards for measuring, preventing and managing workplace heat exposure across sectors.
Now that extreme heat is formally recognised as a notified disaster, we must recognise the workers facing this disaster. Our response frameworks must move beyond releasing advisories, alerts and short-term responses. The Union Ministry of Labour and Employment should develop an occupational health hazard framework for the works and heat to be recognised as occupational hazards. This framework should include mandatory work-rest, shade and hydration provisions, adjusted working hours during periods of extreme heat, and heat exposure standards using indicators such as WBGT and protection of workers’ income when extreme heat reduces working hours. There must also be measures like strengthened labour inspection and enforcement, track of livelihood loss and health of workers, extension of other protection like heat compensation. Such a framework will strengthen workers’ protection and accountability in heat governance.
Another step can also be to re-think a few things in heat action plans. This includes putting workers at the centre, having community participation in such plans, considering geographical demography while making such plans and adopting models which are sustainable and heat resilient.
While we focus on this, we should not forget to hold fossil fuel and oil and gas corporations accountable. A report published by UK-based think tanks shows that 32 companies accounted for the half of the global fossil fuel carbon emission and another study by Quilcaille, Y., Gudmundsson, L., Schumacher, D.L. et al. found that 180 carbon major companies have substantially contributed to half of the increase in heatwaves since pre-industrial times. These data clearly establish that who is responsible for climate change and who should be held accountable. India should support the progressive environment taxation on the profit of major global oil and gas corporations and use the money to develop heat adaptation and mitigation solutions.
Avinash Chanchal is Deputy Program Director (campaigns) at Greenpeace South Asia
Vaishali Upadhyay is climate & energy campaigner at Greenpeace India
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth