Publication Year: 2026

Living with Heat in India: Heat-Health Risks, Vulnerability and Emerging Responses

Overview

This report examines India’s evolving heat risk and its implications for population health, with a focus on changing heat exposure, the populations and places most at risk, and the institutional and policy responses emerging across the country. It assesses India’s progress in responding to extreme heat, identifies gaps in implementation, coordination, data and financing, and consolidates priorities for strengthening long-term heat resilience. The report also highlights practical approaches being tested on the ground and considers how emerging evidence can inform scalable, context-specific responses to the health, livelihood and socioeconomic impacts of extreme heat.

The report draws on historical and projected temperature data, alongside evidence on heat-related health impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. It examines India’s heat governance landscape, including Heat Action Plans (HAPs), health-system preparedness, heat-health surveillance, early warning systems, and interventions led by non-governmental and community-based organisations. It then identifies priorities for institutionalising long-term heat resilience, including mainstreaming heat action across sectors and levels of governance, strengthening institutional and health-system capacities and coordination, unlocking finance for adaptation, and embedding health outcomes in the planning, implementation and evaluation of heat action.

Key Highlights

– India’s temperatures are rising; the average temperature during 2015-2024 was about 0.890C higher than the 1901-30 baseline, with 2024 recorded as the warmest year since 1901.

– The warming is uneven across seasons and regions. Northwestern and central India are experiencing frequent heatwaves, with a predicted expansion to the southern peninsula and a rise in humid heat.

– Extreme heat is increasing health risks, with increasing evidence on heat-related mortalities and illnesses, including links to cardiovascular, kidney, and pregnancy risks.

– Outdoor workers face significant productivity and earning losses due to heat stress, highlighting the need for a calibrated work-rest schedule and basic water, shade, rest and cooling provisions.

– Urban heat islands, built environments, income levels, occupation, migration, gender and other social inequalities can contribute to higher impacts of heat exposure.

– Heat Action Plans (HAPs) have been prepared by 23 states, 195 districts and 64 cities based on NDMA guidelines. Heatwaves were declared a notified natural disaster in August 2026.

– Heat-related illness and death surveillance has been expanded, health facility preparedness and heatstroke management units have been operationalised, and IMD has strengthened early warning capabilities through high-resolution GIS-based forecasting, colour-coded messages and heat-index forecasting.

– While heat adaptation solutions are expanding, the research has focused on documenting interventions and occasionally their potential for exposure reduction. Evaluating their health impacts will be the next frontier

– The report calls for heat action to be integrated across sectors with health outcomes as a guiding principle, sustained financing and strengthening of institutional capacities for long-term resilience.

The report is from the Global Heat Health Information Network – South Asia Hub. The South Asia Heat and Health Hub will serve as the region’s central platform for collaboration, knowledge exchange, and policy innovation on heat-related health risks. You can also read other reports in the series from Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan.

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From Fire Suppression to Climate Adaptation: Reimagining Forest Governance in a Warming World

Summary

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Forests are central to India’s climate and development agenda, underpinning the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, land restoration, and cultural benefits. Yet, they are increasingly vulnerable to climate change, with ~36% of the country’s forests being prone to fire. Moreover, the fire season is projected to lengthen by up to 61 days across India by the end of the century, with nearly 55% of forests expected to experience more severe seasonal fires.

Regional variation in forest-fire seasons, forest types and reported climatic drivers
Source: Author’s compilation based on Kumar et al. (2025)

While a growing body of research shows how climate is driving changes in forest fires across India, limited attention has been paid to how governance systems are addressing these changes. To fill this gap, our issue brief uses forest fires as a case to ask two related questions. First, how do current forest fire responses fare in addressing climate-induced changes? Second, which governance frameworks may be better suited to anticipating, responding to, and adapting to forest fires?

To answer these questions, our brief conceptualises forests as Socioecological Systems (SES) where ecological processes, such as those shaping species composition and distribution or disturbance regimes such as fires and droughts, coevolve with social processes including governance, institutions, markets, and communities. We then use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate risk framework to classify forest fire responses into four types:

– Building adaptive capacity covers responses that enhance the forest system’s ability to anticipate, respond to, and recover from fire risk, such as improving institutional coordination and early warning systems. 
– Sensitivity reduction (ecological and social) focuses on lowering the inherent susceptibility of ecosystems and communities to fire through measures such as fire-resilient species mixes, improving forest health, and livelihood diversification. 
– Exposure reduction aims to limit how much systems come into contact with fire hazards through measures including fire lines and spatial planning. 
– Residual risk management covers response and recovery measures aimed at minimising damage during and after fire events, such as suppression, emergency response, post-fire rehabilitation, and relief mechanisms.

We use the above classification to analyse India’s forest fire policies and their evolution. Our findings show that despite a shift  in discourse from a fire-suppression approach to an ecosystem resilience-building approach, forest fire response in India remains dominated by residual risk management through suppression, with funding heavily skewed toward firefighting infrastructure and personnel. Although policies such as the National Action Plan on Forest Fires (NAPFF) introduce fire risk mapping, these assessments do not incorporate climate variables, projections, or scenario-based analysis, and instead rely on static, historical indicators. 

Evolution of forest fire management in India
Source: Author’s analysis
Fund allocation for forest fire response types under the Centrally Sponsored Scheme, Forest Fire Prevention and Management (CSS-FFPM), in 2023-24 and 2024-25
Source: Author’s analysis based on Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change data

Furthermore, we find that community engagement is largely confined to awareness campaigns and firefighting support, with limited attention to fire’s socio-economic impacts. Decision-making remains largely concentrated within forest departments, with limited devolution to local and community institutions. As a result, governance remains administratively decentralised but functionally centralised, and fire continues to be treated as an external threat to be suppressed rather than a climate-driven process co-produced by underlying social and ecological vulnerabilities.

Indian forest fire governance’s focus on suppression, along with limited climate information, fragmented institutions, and limited community engagement, creates a structural mismatch in the face of emerging climate risks. Addressing this requires a shift towards adaptive governance that integrates climate risk, strengthens socioecological understanding, and enables flexible, learning-based, and multi-level decision-making systems. 

While recent forest policy articulation has begun to recognise resilience and risk, this intent is not consistently translated into planning, financing, or implementation. Addressing forest fire risk under climate change requires moving beyond residual risk management towards a more balanced approach that also reduces exposure and vulnerability. This presents a critical opportunity to reimagine 21st-century forest governance that sustains the ecological, economic, and social functions which forests support in a warming world.

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India’s Electric Vehicle Ecosystem: Stuttering Transition or Strategic Reorientation?

Introduction

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The shift to EVs is happening worldwide; about one in four cars sold in 2025 was electric (International Energy Agency 2026). Over the last decade, India has begun a serious push toward electric vehicles (EVs). The Government of India and most state governments have implemented a range of demand and supply-side support policies (Government of India, n.d.-c, n.d.-d), and the early momentum has come from below. Start-ups and established automakers have begun to make real gains, primarily driven by the rapid adoption of electric two- and three-wheelers (e2W and e3W) (Government of India, n.d.-b; EVreporter.com 2026).

In parallel, public charging has begun to expand in major cities and along key highways (Government of India, n.d.-a) and domestically assembled models are now on sale across a range of prices.

The numbers capture how quickly this has moved: between FY 2019-20 and FY 2024-25, annual EV registrations rose from 1.74 lakh to 19.68 lakh, an increase of elevenfold even after a pandemic dip (PIB Delhi 2026b).

Yet the transition is far from settled. EVs still cost more than their internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) equivalents, which keeps a capable EV beyond the reach of much of the mass market (Elango et al. 2025; Ministry of Power 2023). The stakes are only growing, with India’s vehicle population projected to more than double by 2050 (Mohan et al. 2025), and a fleet that still runs on fossil fuels would lock in high and continuing costs from greenhouse gas and air-pollutant emissions (International Energy Agency 2023). The fuel supply shock that has followed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026 has further sharpened the case for EVs (Shyamasis Das 2026).

The industrial stakes are just as high. India is the world’s fourth-largest automaker, and vehicle manufacturing accounts for roughly half of its manufacturing GDP (NITI Aayog 2025a). The ICEV industry rests on two pillars: large manufacturers and a base of more than 35,000 component makers, most of whom are small and medium-sized firms (Gupta et al. 2023). EV manufacturing has not yet reached the same maturity, and India risks falling behind its competitors. Because China dominates EV manufacturing, there is a particular worry lurking beneath the transition: India could trade its dependence on imported fossil fuels for a new dependence on imported EVs and their components (PIB Delhi 2026a).

However, the same moment also presents an opportunity to build a competitive EV manufacturing industry, one that increases industrial employment and exports while avoiding new import dependence. Past industrial policy helped India catch up in conventional vehicles and build a strong automotive base, even if that base has struggled to produce globally competitive cars (United Nations Industrial Development Organization and Department of Science and Technology 2023).

The strategic questions, therefore, remain. Can India strengthen its automobile sector in the EV era? What would success in EV manufacturing look like? What obstacles lie in the way? Moreover, does India’s current research, development and demonstration (RD&D) ecosystem possess the capabilities required to support that ambition? Our issue brief examines these questions by analysing the evolution of India’s EV policy landscape, the current state of domestic manufacturing, and the strengths and limitations of its RD&D ecosystem.

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