Kochi: At least 11 people died and more than 600 others suffered from heat-related health issues after they had to stand out in the open on Sunday, April 16, for more than five hours to attend a government award function in Maharashtra’s Navi Mumbai.
As per some reports, local officials said that the event – which has come under fire for several reasons, including the lack of adequate arrangements to deal with the heat – went against existing Heat Action Plans.
What are Heat Action Plans, and why do we need them?
Hot, hotter, hottest
India’s summers are hot, but they’re also getting hotter. February this year, for instance, was the hottest on record in India since 1901, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD).
Heat waves are now more frequent across many parts of India. As per the IMD, a heatwave is said to occur when the average maximum temperature is 4.5-6.4º C above the long-term average (or above 40º C in the plains, 30º C in hilly areas, or 37º C in coastal areas).
India recorded 280 days of heat waves across 16 states in 2022 – the most ever in a decade – as per a report by the Centre for Science and Environment. Maharashtra itself experienced four heat waves in two summer months last year. The IMD warned in February this year that in the months to come – from March to May – there was an “enhanced probability” for the occurrence of heat waves in many parts of central and adjoining northwest India. Currently, as of April 17, the IMD issued a heat wave alert for up to five days in parts of eastern and western Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Sikkim, Odisha, Jharkhand and coastal Andhra Pradesh. Schools and colleges have remained closed as the heat wave progressed in West Bengal and Tripura.
Science shows that climate change plays a major role in the increased occurrence and intensity of these heat waves. For instance, climate scientists found that climate change made the heat waves that swept across large parts of India and Pakistan in May last year a whopping 30 times more likely.
The impacts of heat waves on human health include dehydration, dizziness, exhaustion, stroke and even death.
Representative image of a heat wave. Photo: Eric/Flickr CC BY NC ND 2.0
Heat Action Plans
Given how much heat waves impact people, especially the poor and other vulnerable sections, governments and administrations have begun developing Heat Action Plans, which are documents that list preparatory, adaptive and responsive measures for government departments to tackle the heat and its impacts.
Odisha’s 2022 state Heat Action Plan developed by the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority, for instance, provides Standard Operating Procedures for different departments and district administrations and also includes steps such as rescheduling working hours for daily wage labourers, provisioning drinking water and first aid facilities at temporary working sheds, changing school timings, and so on. The city of Ahmedabad implemented South Asia’s first HAP in 2013 after a heatwave in 2010. This, scientists found, may have prevented more than 1,000 deaths due to heat in 2014-15.
However, there are many gaps in HAPs in India, found a recent assessment of 37 HAPs at city, district and state levels by the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These included being underfunded and not being built for local contexts.
The assessment also found that HAPs are not sufficiently transparent. There is no national repository of HAPs and very few HAPs are listed online, the report noted. The report recommends creating a national repository of HAPs within the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and that independent, and publicly accessible external evaluations of their performance be conducted regularly.
Focus areas
In December last year, the Union government said that the NDMA and the IMD are working with 23 states that are prone to heatwave conditions to develop state-level action plans. These include Delhi, Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Jharkhand.
HAPs are a new policy instrument and are currently spreading, Aditya Valiathan Pillai, associate fellow at CPR and one of the co-authors of the report on HAPs, wrote in an email to The Wire. It is crucial that areas like Delhi and other hot north Indian states, and humid areas which could present a high risk of mortality during a heatwave, have coverage, he said.
Do any specific levels of HAPs – such as at the state, district or local levels – take priority?
Not necessarily, according to Pillai.
“So the idea is not to privilege HAPs at one level over the other but to figure out ways of making them work together in complementary ways,” he wrote in an email to The Wire. “So in a state, you would want the state and city/district HAPs to be designed to speak to each other.”
That’s because each level of government handles different things (as per the Constitutional division of powers), Pillai clarified. If one wants to protect agriculture from heat, for example, you need an insurance mechanism which will need to be at the state level because of the scale it will need to involve and because agriculture is a state subject.
“But setting up cooling centres would of course be better at the local level,” he wrote.
To make our HAPs more effective and impactful, it is necessary to incorporate granular scale heat vulnerability and hotspot mapping assessments by leveraging the latest advancements in geospatial technology and field-based assessments, said Shreya Wadhawan, Research Analyst, Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).
This involves mapping heat-sensitive areas based on land use, vegetation fraction, built-up areas, adaptive capacity, and population characteristics, she wrote in an email to The Wire.
“Further, it is essential to recalibrate forecast models to region-specific thresholds for energy and water demand, crop, and health impacts to enable impact-based heat forecast alerts. This will help decision-makers plan in advance to address the issue of heat stress,” she wrote.