'Natural Calamity' Status for Heatwaves Shields the State, Leaves Labourers Outside
An unstarred question in the parliament’s Monsoon Session, by Anoop Pradhan Valmiki on August 4, asked whether the government would recognise heatwaves as a natural disaster. Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai cited the 16th Finance Commission’s recommendation that heatwaves and lightning be notified as natural calamities given their rising frequency and intensity from climate change. This acknowledgment by the Union government unlocks both national and state disaster relief funds for heatwave response.
But it falls short of alleviating the danger of heatwaves and bringing climate accountability, especially for labourers. A labourer’s heat exhaustion, compounded by the metabolic heat of physical exertion, is incomparable to stepping outside for a few hours on an intensely hot day.
The home ministry’s notification opens the door to holding the government accountable for not mitigating heatwave casualties. Naming heatwaves as a natural calamity rather than the impact of climate change interrupts that accountability at the first step. Legal scholars Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat hold that an injury must first be named before it can be blamed on someone and turned into a claim against them.
Calling heat “natural” forecloses that process before it starts. The state’s own appendix to this parliamentary answer only acknowledges impact on life and health, and lists heatstroke cases and confirmed deaths, state by state, while remaining silent on impact on labourers and livelihood.
Also read: Hot Nights are Making India’s Heatwaves Worse
Naming heatwaves as “natural calamity” is thus political, turning a crisis the state is responsible for into an event it merely responds to post facto. In fact the Supreme Court, in M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024) has recognised the right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change flows from Articles 14 and 21, a right premised on climate change as a human-caused, state-accountable crisis. With no one to blame, there is no claim to make, and the worker is left to absorb the harm.
This after-the-fact framing is critical for labourers including delivery, farm, construction, metal, waste, warehouse, and brick kiln workers, and domestic labourers, who labour for long hours without cooling breaks, shade, paid heat leave or personal protective equipment.
Residents from nearby slum settlements sleep on Versova Beach amid intense heatwave and frequent power outages, in Mumbai, Maharashtra, early on June 19, 2026. Photo: PTI/Kunal Patil.
A coolie in Delhi, who asked not to be named fearing it would affect his work availability, described sweating through his clothes in Delhi’s humid heat. Coolies I interviewed noted, to keep working in heat, “most days we take golis (pills) from the pharmacists and go back to work,” an added cost they pay themselves. This author conducted a focus group interview on July 31, 2026.
The same pattern recurred in interviews among landfill, brick kiln, and farmworkers I interviewed, all of whom emphasised stable or falling wages, exhausting labour, and rising health costs. The court in Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India (1984) has held that Article 21’s right to life includes humane and safe working conditions. Framing heatwaves only within disaster risk reduction, without attention to occupational safety and labour codes, treats labourers’ rights as incidental to a hazard they endure daily to keep society running.
Registering heatwaves alongside other discrete, property-based, visible damages such as cyclones, floods, cloudbursts, produces an abstract idea of heat measurable through deaths and air temperature thresholds rather than our lived experience.
Heat, unlike other climatic events, comes invisibly, and slowly accumulates in the body over time, which registries built to count deaths can never see. Jeff Goodell, in his book The Heat Will Kill You First, describes heat as a force that surrounds and works on the body, racing the heart, blurring vision, producing a thirst that is hard to quench.
The record-breaking heat and intense heatwaves of this year are not simply weather and cannot be dismissed as summer. They are the outcome of a fossil-fuel-dependent economy that treats land and labour, in Karl Polanyi’s terms, as fictitious commodities, disposable inputs to production rather than living systems.
Lost tree cover, expanding concrete, energy-intensive mechanised labour, and AC vents pumping heat back into the air, alongside the absence of wage security and the right to cool are outcomes the state has allowed. Humid heat and night heat are products of the same extractivist economy.
Workers assemble air coolers at a market amid heatwave conditions, in Kamla Nagar area, New Delhi on May 25, 2026. Photo: PTI/Tanmay Pande.
A street vendor from Madhu Vihar market in Delhi told this author on July 22, 2026, “Heat already pours down from the sky, and then there’s this, the AC heat from the shops.” The appendix to the notification confirms this as it explicitly lists harm measured only in cases of heat stroke and deaths due to heat stroke, nothing else.
If compensation is limited to heat-related casualties, what covers lost work capacity, livelihood, and the kidney and cardiovascular damage from repeated heat stress? Gig, contractual, and seasonal labour does not solve this; it erases the physical labour of workers, most of whom are migrants from marginalised communities, including Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and women.
Measurement is the third failure. Despite ILO standards, the Indian state still relies on rudimentary dry-bulb temperature readings to classify heat waves, while the ILO and some countries have shifted to Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT); 35°C at 85% humidity is worse than 40°C dry heat, and older workers face higher risk than the official threshold registers.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) thresholds are determined by dry-bulb readings, without accounting for humidity, radiant heat, or the metabolic heat generated by physical labour.
A 2014 peer-reviewed study of Ahmedabad’s May 2010 heat wave, when temperatures reached 46.8°C, found 1,344 excess all-cause deaths, a 43% rise over the reference period, using only official city death registrations.
The authors cautioned that deaths at home or among the homeless and daily labourers are unlikely to be registered, since existing systems are not built to capture heat as an underlying cause.
The study concluded that IMD’s heatwave threshold likely underestimates public health impact, since it was never built to track health outcomes; a lower, health-correlated threshold would predict risk more accurately.
Health-based reporting does not capture all cases either: unequal access to public hospitals, the large number of migrant labourers without healthcare, and heat’s tendency to trigger preexisting conditions. As a result, both the forecasting of heatwaves and the counting of heat stress casualties are grossly limited.
The Union government data shows 4,853 heat stroke cases in 2026, against only 20 confirmed deaths. Across agencies, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), and IMD reported varying totals 20,615, 17,767, 10,545, respectively for heatstroke deaths between 2000 and 2020.
The disaster list can expand while workers’ actual experience of heat stays outside its frame. Thermal justice requires the state to measure heat as physical labourers experience it, through WBGT (temperature, humidity, wind speed, radiation) and metabolic load, not just IMD’s dry-bulb thresholds, and to build enforcement mechanisms that do not depend on a death certificate ever being filed.
A man beats the heat at a public tap facility at Sangam, in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, amid an intense heatwave on May 26, 2026. Photo: PTI.
The ILO recommends WBGT as the standard for labour rights protections, but researchers have found that WBGT is not routinely measured in India, and recommend it as the starting point for mapping heat risk nationally. Many countries have accepted this as the standard for workplace heat protections.
Naming heat a natural calamity is a relocation of responsibility. The notification ignores what would have actually protected the labouring body: binding regulations, employer mandates, and compensation for the vast unmeasured middle ground between full health and death. In an ongoing Supreme Court petition, Adil Sharfuddin v. Union of India, Shashank Singh, counsel for the petitioner, has asked the court for exactly this, framing it as essential to labourers’ rights during heatwaves.
In an interview on July 21, 2026, before the notification was announced, Singh, who has represented the petition pro bono, traced his interest in the case to time spent among MGNREGA workers, understanding their conditions directly, where he saw that heat exposure compounds existing labour and class vulnerabilities.
A woman covers herself and a kid on a hot summer day in New Delhi on May 19, 2026. Photo: PTI/Salman Ali.
He identified three gaps in the state’s approach: the absence of sanctions for non-compliance, the state’s prior refusal to recognise heat as a disaster, and the failure to bring domestic standards in line with the ILO’s. Even short of full ILO parity, Singh argued, the state could mandate minimum wages during heat periods and require employers to shift, rather than halt work, since labourers in the unorganised and migrant sectors need the work and cannot simply stop. This position follows from rights already established under Articles 14 and 21 in Ranjitsinh and Bandhua Mukti Morcha.
Courts elsewhere have already gone further than recognition. In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v. Switzerland that heatwaves put older women at disproportionate risk, and that Switzerland’s failure to address this foreseeable harm to a vulnerable group violated their right to private and family life; a standard India’s disaster registry, built to count deaths after they occur, does not meet.
India does not lack the constitutional basis to meet that standard as Ranjitsinh already reads Articles 14 and 21 to include protection from climate harm, and Bandhua Mukti Morcha already reads Article 21 to include safe working conditions.
What is missing is a state willing to adhere to Ranjitsinh and to recognise that climate change’s impact is not equally distributed, it falls hardest on labourers and other marginalised groups with the least capacity to adapt to it. The distance between this notification and a binding occupational heat standard is the distance between a monsoon forecast and monsoon rain.
Sanghamitra Padhy is an Associate Professor of Law and Society and Environmental Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
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