Heatwaves Overwhelm Indians While Officials Ignore It

As climate induced heatwaves kill thousands Indian officials are hiding their head in the sand

(Image: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

August 24, 2024

From around March to June this year, several thousand people in India died and several hundred thousand more fell ill from a heat wave, according to independent public health experts. For several days, peak temperatures soared over 50* (122*F) in many parts of the country, especially in the north. The heat wave was the most severe and one of the longest recorded.  

While the extreme 2024 heat wave in India was widely covered by the media in India and around the globe, the country has witnessed the adverse impacts of climate change for decades. “In India, with the world’s largest population, heatwaves occur annually,” notes a study published in ScienceDirect.

Exposure to extreme heat causes mortality and illness through numerous ways including toxicity, inflammatory response, and coagulation as well as by damaging the brain, heart, intestines, kidneys, liver, lungs, and pancreas.

While severe heatwaves, as in 2024, cause more immediate deaths, the relatively milder ones claim more lives over time as they are more common, according to Tirthankar Banerjee, a climate researcher at Banaras Hindu University, India.

The milder heatwaves are the deadliest because they “were so much more common than the hotter ones. In the end, the most extreme heatwaves turned out to cause the lowest number of deaths because they were so infrequent,” according to a study by Jeroen de Bont, from Sweden’s Institute of Environmental Medicine.

Extreme heatwaves also adversely impact India in numerous other ways. Each year, at least 80 million tons of fresh fruits and vegetables, about 10% of India’s output of these food items, are destroyed by heat since there are very few cold storage facilities.

Heat also causes loss of soil moisture and hence reduces India’s agricultural output, much of which depends on water from the monsoon rains. In fact, the intense humid heatwaves also generate short bursts of heavy rainfall which flood farms and destroy crops, Poulomi Ganguli, a hydrologist at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, told Nature.

Also, agricultural laborers – as well as other workers - are not as productive, and often cannot work during much of the day, and hence earn less. Their lower income means less food for their poor families. For children, less food and inability to focus results in lower educational test scores, according to a study by Teevrat Garg, who teaches at the University of California, San Diego, and other researchers.

Garg advocates expanded use of social protection programs like India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme to supplement income for the poor who are hurt by the climate changes.  

By the end of this century, higher temperatures could lead to a reduction in math and reading test scores that amount to a loss of “two years of schooling, over the course of a student’s education,” according to Garg’s study.

By 2050, rising temperatures and changing monsoon rainfall patterns due to climate change, could reduce India’s annual GDP by 2.8 percent and depress the living standards of half the country’s population, according to a World Bank study led by Muthukumara Mani. “Roughly 600 million people in India lived in locations that could either become moderate or severe hotspots by 2050 under a business-as-usual scenario,” the report notes. The states of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are estimated to experience a decline of more than 9 percent in living standards. Other states that will be severely impacted are Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra.

According to government of India figures, only about 100 were killed and about 40,000 made ill by this year’s heatwave. This low mortality figure, compared to several thousand deaths estimated by public health experts, is due to the fact that typically health officials do not list heat as a cause on a death certificate maybe due to bureaucratic rules or political guidelines. Such undercounting of deaths means heatwave problems are not officially recognized as major issues requiring immediate policy actions.