Right To Cool For The Rural Heat Poverty

As the mercury continues to soar, 2025 is likely to be hotter than 2024. The most visible and frequently talked about impact of this is the feeling of tiredness, dizziness and rise in hospitalisations in the urban areas. The IMD predicts a sharp increase in heatwave days, especially in central, eastern, and northwestern regions of India . India faced 536 heatwave days last year, with 41789 suspected heat strokes and 143 heat-related deaths . Such cases are often underreported and under-investigated due to a dearth of infrastructure and human resources. This staggering number, based on IMD data, doesn't mean every day was a heatwave, but that multiple regions endured extreme heat simultaneously, again and again - a clear sign that heat stress is no longer an exception but the new normal.

It is often argued that heat stress is experienced more in urban areas and comparatively less in rural areas, as they have natural cooling mechanisms. Although this rosy and romantic picture is far from reality, there is often a lack of enough representation from and enough preparedness in rural areas. Urban areas have higher carbon footprints due to higher income levels, greater consumption, and more transportation and energy use. Rural areas too contribute to emissions through energy consumption, agriculture and transportation, but bear the burden of dispersed settlement, poverty, vulnerability, infrastructure deficiency, limited access to resources/services, increased cost of adaptation and migration patterns. The city of Pune has taken measures that reflect a multi-pronged approach combining surveillance, healthcare readiness, public awareness, and research to mitigate the health risks posed by increasing heat stress . It is widely covered in the media, and that's great. But what about the rural communities and especially women?

"The rich often escape the heat stress," say Durga Modi from Rangaon Road, Sakshi Soni from Rajpur, and Jeeve Bavriya from Julwaniya. These didis, from one of the hottest and poorest regions of rural Madhya Pradesh, express a stark reality. According to them, the most impacted sectors due to heat stress in rural India are agriculture, labour, horticulture, forestry, livestock, and MGNREGA work uptake. The production of pulses like tur and gram and oilseeds such as mustard shows declines, which could affect availability in certain rural areas. Extreme heat during the wheat harvest season speeds up crop maturation, shortening the grain-filling period and lowering overall yields. The 2025 heatwave is expected to cut wheat and rice production by 6-10%, putting the food security of millions in rural India at serious risk. The core of this is water insecurity and gender inequity, due to structural vulnerabilities surrounding this.  FAO suggests that women's workforce participation declines in the summer. Asha Yadav didi from Koraon, Uttar Pradesh, substantiates this by stating, "Unpaid labour for women intensifies in summer, as they venture out to fetch water, energy sources, and livestock, while also attending to care work.".

They mention that as the handpumps and ponds dry up, they have to venture into the adjacent forest areas. They make an interesting observation stating that the cattle fodder and water sources in forests have also started drying up, which did not happen earlier. The mango plantations in recent years have yielded fruits only in alternate years, unlike the annual yield in the years preceding that. There is an acute shortage and price surge of fruits and vegetables, leading to nutrition insecurity. Due to storage infrastructure and accelerated spoilage, perishable items are sold at throwaway prices. Rural communities are left with only PDS-supplied cereals, sugar, kerosene and salt. But if the heat increases, they don't even consume what's available and even avoid going to nearby mandis. 

India's energy demand during the peak heatwave months from April to June in 2024 was 10.8% higher than the previous year, and air conditioning accounted for an estimated 30 per cent of the year-on-year increase . Energy needs in rural areas due to heat stress have also gone up. In some areas, communities face up to almost 6 hours of load shedding. There have also been instances of disaster and accidents of transformers catching fire due to extreme heat. The heat poverty exacerbates with extreme indoor temperatures due to a lack of electrification and unsustainable housing. Fans have become a necessity in rural areas, frequently demanded by the didis, which are not available to the poor and vulnerable. The PMAY's uptake has shifted people from their traditional and sustainable housing methods to concrete housing. 

Heatwave-related deaths rose by 34% from 2003-2012 to 2013-2022, likely underestimating actual counts . The didis from Madhya Pradesh have complained of children being more cranky due to dehydration, suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea, affecting the psycho-social health of a household. Some of them have also reported having to admit their children due to the severity of symptoms, and health facilities may lack the appropriate and timely treatments. Asha didi from Koraon says that women face more sanitation- and hygiene-related health issues due to water stress. Many pregnant women have gone into premature labour or opted for a pre-mature C-section due to deteriorating health conditions caused by heat poverty. 

The inherent nature of rural resilience has also pushed the rural inhabitants to adapt to survive the heat poverty, and many things that they have initiated themselves. Many have initiated plantations for shade and to counter deforestation. Divya didi from Satbarwa, Jharkhand, talks about the increased uptake of bori bandh - a low-cost, community-managed water harvesting technique using cement bags filled with sand and soil to stop water flow - especially in water-stressed areas of Jharkhand. The houses constructed under PMAY have been modified with a mud house extension for indoor resting during extreme heat.  Those who could afford solar infrastructure did opt for sumps, handpumps and so on. There are some gharelu treatments for dealing with heat stress, such as the consumption of onion pulp, boiled mango pulp pasted on the body to cool it down, sattu drink, makka pej and bel sherbet. Small shades have been built in the fields to seek some respite from the heat. While cow dung potai is common, jute bags are also used to cool down the indoors and shade for livestock. 

India is expected to lose 5% of its GDP by 2030 due to heat stress, warns the World Bank . At the national level, the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) does create a space for heat stress in its framework, but it is more from a public health service delivery perspective. There are public health campaigns, training community health workers on treatment protocols, warnings, alerts and advisories. Most responses today miss the larger crisis of rural heat poverty, spanning water, energy, livelihoods, and gender vulnerabilities. The State Action Plan for Climate Change (SPACC) for each state should have an action plan on tackling not merely the heat stress, but the structural barriers around heat poverty. Given the multi-dimensional nature of heat poverty in the rural areas, a serious and mandatory preparedness is required in a decentralised manner, as the contexts, needs, preparedness, and response will vary for every state, district, sub-district, as well as the Gram Panchayat. The 'right to cool' campaign majorly in the urban areas, under Article 21 to ensure installing shaded canopies made from heat-reflective materials, setting up free water ATMs near labor hubs, and deploying mobile cooling stations equipped with fans and basic first-aid facilities, must be a part of heat poverty preparedness for and response to the rural areas as well.

Transform Rural India is a leading expert in designing scalable, community-centred solutions that bridge society (Samaaj), government (Sarkaar), and markets (Bazaar) for the Green Economic Transition and has been successful in anchoring place-based action at scale by demonstrating decentralised, large-scale resilience building is achievable through Locality Compacts of communities, Panchayats, and the local administration leading the effort.  Although water structures and plantations are being taken up by MGNREGA, a spatial analysis with a heat stress lens is required in the decentralised planning processes of VPRP-GPDP for them to be resilient and translate into action. This will need convergence, resources and execution through MGNREGA, PMKSY, NRLM, Jal Shakti initiatives and beyond. Green Livelihoods and Market Linkages (Bazaar) through diversification and strengthening of livelihoods that are less vulnerable to heat stress, such as agroforestry value chains, NTFP (non-timber forest products) marketing and linking rural producers to climate-aligned markets, reducing their exposure to climate-induced economic shocks.

The energy insecurity can be countered with decentralised renewable energy to be made more affordable and available with integration with skilling, entrepreneurship and green jobs in various individual as well as community/ public spaces of health, livelihoods, education, electrification, drinking water and so on. Renewable energy-powered Panchayats can ensure the continued provision of services for critical and time-sensitive demands. Many mortalities require a death audit with a heat poverty lens, which could be a strategy for being better prepared for the future.  

Identification of water-stressed areas and provision of water through tankers or other measures by the government is also a demand raised by the rural communities. Although there are provisions that are to be made for the workforce in the informal sector, stringent enforcement for shades, resting places, sanitation facilities, food and water access must be enforced through the preparedness of the Government as well as we private sector.  The health centres with active leadership of Jan Arogya Samitis (JAS) need to prepare for heat stress regarding facility-level services such as ORS, saline bottles and other essential heat-related drugs, building last-mile preparedness. Will the rural communities have no choice but to accept this as the new normal? Place-based transformation at scale is not a distant dream - it's already unfolding.

With institutional backing, the Locality Compacts can accelerate India's rural Green Economic Transition, ensuring that vulnerable communities are not left behind.

Views are personal

The author is Lead - Climate Action, Transform Rural India, a development design organisation, works on transforming India's bottom 100,000 languishing localities into flourishing communities