How Can India Finance its Heat Action Plans?
The country has drafted hundreds of Heat Action Plans to combat the crisis, but the challenge of finding money to make them work remains
The country needs dedicated financial mechanisms to help implement heat action plans on ground.
Visual Credits: Paridhi Choudhary
India has more heat action plans than any other country in the world. Across 23 states, there are a total of 304 heat action plans, with 64 approved, and hundreds more still being developed to combat the heat down to the district and municipal levels. But as the country is in the midst of prolonged heatwaves— 95 of the world’s top 100 hottest cities are now in India— these plans seem to only exist on paper.
The problem isn’t a lack of planning, it is the lack of funding. The country needs dedicated financial mechanisms to help implement these plans on ground.
The consequences of this are increasingly visible. Recently, a protest in Noida erupted where thousands of workers demanded wage hikes, fixed hours, and overtime pay. But the underlying issue that ties all of these demands together is this: workers in India’s informal sector are most exposed to extreme heat. While they certainly deserve more compensation for this, they also deserve to be protected.
Unlike floods and cyclones, heat has not been notified in the National Disaster Management Act. This means that states cannot rely on disaster funds to tackle extreme heat crises. While there is a 2024 government order that allows heatwaves to qualify for mitigation funds, the question remains on availability of funding, districts that can access it, and through what mechanisms.
According to experts, the problem runs far deeper than just a lack of resources. “Heat as an issue is diffused across the department, it cuts across health, labour, urban development, environment, and disaster management — each with different priorities, mandates, and budget lines. It is difficult to put them together,” said Bhasker Padigala, Climate and Environment Adviser, British High Commission in India. This means every department shares the responsibility, but no department allocates the money.
While heat action plans have cropped up across the country, experts argue that many of them are working as standalone documents rather than as part of a broader governance process. Fragmented funding, lack of impact data and institutional support have meant India’s plans to combat extreme heat have expanded faster than its ability to implement them.
Making Do With Restricted Resources
It’s not that funding has never been attempted. Local governments and district administrations have made efforts, drawing on whatever discretionary budgets they could access, say experts. But to combat the heat issue, Dhruba Purkayastha, Director at InfraBlocks Capital explains, “Heat spending is a recurring public expenditure that municipalities need to budget for, not a one-time investment.”
The challenge is particularly acute for urban local bodies and district administrations, which are often responsible for implementing heat action plans, but have limited fiscal autonomy. Municipal corporations are expected to create cooling centres, improve water access, expand green cover and strengthen early warning systems, yet many lack dedicated revenue streams for climate adaptation.
According to the Lancet Countdown 2025, India lost 247 billion potential labour hours to heat exposure in 2024, a record high, and up 124% from the 1990s baseline. With 92% of the country’s workforce employed in the informal sector, the people most exposed to heat are also the least protected by institutional framework. “The Heat Action Plan calls for workplace protection as their 'last mile.' Yet that is precisely where implementation breaks down,” said Yogendra Samant, Labour Inspection Specialist - South Asia at the International Labour Organisation. Aarti Nain, who is a Senior Advisor of India Cooling Programme at United Nation Environment Programme, pointed out that cooling infrastructure remains absent across many MSMEs and informal workplaces. Workers often lack access to formal finance for even basic cooling solutions.
Indian Cities Have Replicated the Plan, Not the Process
India’s first heat action plan came to fruition after a deadly 2010 heatwave in Ahmedabad overwhelmed the city’s hospitals. The city’s heat action plan emerged as a pioneer in public health and urban adaptation programmes, which helped protect residents from extreme heatwaves. It used weather data to forecast extreme temperatures and broadcast alerts to the public well in advance. It also operated a color coded warning scale for heat alerts.
But according to Abhiyant Tiwari, Health and Climate Resilience Lead at the National Resources Defence Council (NRDC), many cities that later adopted similar plans focused on replicating the document rather than the system that made it effective. “What made Ahmedabad work was not the document. It was the years of relationship-building and iterative capacity training that preceded it. Cities that copied the plan skipped that part.”
The temperature thresholds adopted by other cities often failed to reflect local weather conditions, and many jumped to long-term mitigation strategies before securing the basics. “Looking at long-term solutions is a good step forward,” Tiwari added, “but cities should not miss out on the basics like strengthening early warning systems, capacity building, and putting preparedness measures in place.”
The other structural problem heat action plans face is data. There is no epidemiological dataset in India that links heat exposure to health outcomes at a population level. The National Family Health Survey, one of the country’s richest health datasets, has no heat-health outcome linkage.
“We don't have enough routine surveillance data that's been collected over many years to be able to even generate hypotheses about what the actual burden of disease with heat is,” says Dr Bhargav Krishna, Convenor at Sustainable Futures Collaborative. “And so we're reliant on proxy measures to try and estimate those impacts. Physicians aren't trained to identify what heat-related illnesses or various other climate-sensitive diseases look like.”
A study by the Council of Energy, Environment, and Water, applying the IPCC's risk assessment framework across all 734 districts in India, found that 57% of India's districts, which collectively house three-quarter of the country's population, fall into the high-to-very-high risk categories for extreme heat. The majority of those districts are not remote or rural. They are heavily urbanised: state capitals, coastal cities across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, and the dense districts of the Indo-Gangetic plain including Delhi NCR. Approximately 60% of India's extreme heat problem, the research found, is attributable to rapid urbanisation.
Can Heat be Financed?
Without data linking heat to measurable health and economic outcomes, the case for climate finance also remains permanently weak. Compared to renewable energy projects, which offer clear revenue streams and scalable returns, heat resilience investments are harder to finance. Padigala says, “Investors need clear returns. Heat resilience projects are small in scale compared to renewable energy projects where there is a clear source of revenue."
Yet the economic cost of heat is already being absorbed across the economy—in lower worker productivity, reduced agricultural output, supply chain disruptions, and rising healthcare expenditure. “We are already paying for heat. Whether the costs are passed on to consumers through higher prices or absorbed by producers through lower earnings, heat is already affecting economic outcomes. Yet these impacts remain largely absent from mainstream financial decision-making,” says Suranjali Tandon, Associate Professor at National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.
What Can Be Done?
Experts agree that rather than focusing on just financing issues, heat action plans need to look at structural fixes. The first being that heat waves are notified as a disaster under NDMA.
Vishwas Chitale, Climate Resilience Lead at CEEW, says, “Once the notification of heatwaves comes through, it will open up a window for cities and states to submit fund allocation proposals to implement heat action plans.”
“There could be a specific proposal that can be prepared on MSMEs that can talk about providing cooling shelter or cooling mechanisms in industrial zones, which cities can submit to the state and then state can decide on allocation of funds for implementation.”
Tamil Nadu is one such state that declared heat a state-level disaster, unlocking State Disaster Response Fund money for heat preparedness. This move required no new legislation, only a gazetted notification and stands as a replicable model for other states. At a city level, a governance model piloted in Thane by the CEEW team offers a more immediate and replicable fix. Chitale explained, “We got to know that there is a lot of lack of coordination among the different departments and that is one of the key issues in overall climate governance.” To address this, Chitale says they set up a Heat Action Plan Taskforce for Thane chaired by its municipal commissioner so that accountability is built in the structure rather than assumed..
There is also a need for blended finance, which means pooling money from both the public and private sector to fund cooling infrastructure and climate resilience projects. However, experts argue that attracting private capital will require better measurement of heat-related risks, particularly at the corporate level.
Hardik Shah, Sustainable Investments Head at DSP Asset Managers, pointed out that corporate disclosures under the Business Responsibility and Sustainable Reporting (BRSR) framework contain almost no adaptation data, no workforce productivity impact, no supply chain heat risk, no capital expenditure for resilience. As a result, investors and lenders struggle to quantify heat-related risks and direct capital towards adaptation measures. Strengthening adaptation disclosures and aligning them with global reporting standards could make heat risks more visible—and therefore more financeable.
Tiwari notes that previous heat action plans did help in saving people’s lives. “We now need to go deeper, look at the granular data to understand the impact of heat especially health impacts that are locally quantifiable and also need to look into the regulation of the heat impact as it is a cross sectoral issue and needs to be coordinated by national agencies like disaster management and IMD.”
India now has one of the most extensive Heat Action Plan systems in the world. Yet as heatwaves intensify, the gap between policy and practice remains wide. Closing that gap will require more than new plans—it will require the institutions, data systems, and financing structures needed to turn preparedness into protection.