The WHO now treats extreme heat as an occupational risk demanding accountability. Indian law, even after the new labour codes, still treats it as weather. That gap is where the duty of care goes to die.

When roughly 45,000 factory workers walked off the floor in Noida and Greater Noida this April, the stated demands were wages, fixed hours and overtime, and the state read the protest, which turned violent by its fourth day, as a law-and-order problem. But the workers at its centre, in garment, footwear and electronics units, are precisely the population Indian field research identifies as bearing the highest occupational heat burden. One survey of garment workers across Delhi NCR, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat found nearly nine in ten reporting heat-related symptoms in the previous year. Heat was not the banner they marched under, but it runs through the twelve-hour shifts they were marching against. It is time Indian law caught up with that reality.

The World Health Organization has given the issue an institutional frame. Its initiative against extreme heat and related environmental health risks in workplaces and major events, developed within its Sport for Health programme with FIFA and in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization and the ILO, treats extreme heat, air pollution and UV exposure as occupational and environmental health risks requiring protocols and accountability. The ILO estimates 2.4 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat, with losses equivalent to 80 million full-time jobs projected annually by 2030. The legal question that follows is simple to ask and hard to answer in India today: when heat harms or kills a worker, who owes a duty of care, and how is it enforced?

The statutory gap after the labour codes

India brought its consolidated labour codes into force in November 2025. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (OSHWC Code), operative from 21 November 2025, was the natural vehicle to codify heat protection. It largely did not. The Factories Act, 1948, which the Code subsumes, at least treated heat as a health matter, requiring ventilation and a temperature securing reasonable comfort and preventing injury. The Code addresses workplace temperature substantively only in narrow contexts such as dock work; where heat safety appears, it reads as discretionary welfare rather than a binding, inspectable technical mandate.

Three structural features deepen the problem. First, heat-related illness and death are not clearly recognised as occupational hazards, so they are treated closer to acts of nature than to preventable risks a duty-holder must control. Second, the Code permits exemptions for establishments in defined circumstances, often framed around economic activity. Third, its factory protections turn on worker-count thresholds that can exclude the smallest, hottest, least-ventilated MSME units, exactly where danger concentrates. The result is that a large share of India's informal and outdoor workforce, numbering in the hundreds of millions, sits outside meaningful protection, even as analyses classify a majority of Indian districts as heat-prone and heatwaves reach humid zones that once rarely saw them.

There is, however, a seed within the Code itself. It gives an employee the right to flag a reasonable apprehension of imminent serious injury or danger to health, obliging the employer to take remedial action. Read purposively, extreme heat can constitute exactly such an imminent danger. Operationalising this, through rules that define heat thresholds, mandate acclimatisation, rest, shade and hydration, and protect the right to pause work in dangerous conditions without loss of pay, would begin to address the piece-rate trap that keeps workers labouring through the heat because they cannot afford to stop.

Advisories are not enforceable rights

The common reassurance is that India already has more than 200 Heat Action Plans across some 23 states, with colour-coded warnings, cooling-shelter guidance and advice to shift work away from the midday peak. These are genuine achievements of public health administration. But most operate as advisories rather than enforceable obligations, and are generally not notified under the Disaster Management Act, 2005. Municipalities typically face no penalty for failing to open a shelter or run a water station, and responsibility is dispersed across agencies. Two further gaps compound this: heatwaves are not on India's list of notified national disasters, which constrains dedicated relief funding, and frameworks lean on dry-bulb temperature while giving less weight to humid heat, even though human tolerance falls sharply as humidity rises.

The constitutional anchor: Ranjitsinh and its unfinished business

In M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024), a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court recognised a distinct fundamental right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change, rooted in Article 21 and Article 14, expressly noting the disproportionate burden borne by the poor and marginalised and calling for both mitigation and adaptation. It is a significant advance in principle. But the same judgment flagged that India has no umbrella climate legislation. The Court, in effect, declared the right's arrival while noting there was no statutory road to it.

Heat protection for workers and event-goers is among the most concrete places to build that road. The right can be operationalised by giving Heat Action Plans statutory backing with named enforcing agencies and penalties, by weighing the notification of heatwaves as a disaster to unlock funding and mandate, and by converting the OSHWC Code's discretionary heat provisions into mandatory, humidity-aware standards through the rules. India has also not ratified ILO Convention 155, the instrument most associated with enforceable domestic occupational-safety obligations; comparative benchmarks such as California's WBGT-based work-rest and acclimatisation standards and France's droit de retrait show what enforceable heat law looks like in practice.

What works: templates India helped pioneer

The templates are not hypothetical, and several are Indian. After a 2010 heatwave that caused an excess of 1,344 all-cause deaths in a single month, Ahmedabad built South Asia's first Heat Action Plan with the Indian Institute of Public Health-Gandhinagar, the NRDC and the Public Health Foundation of India; a pilot evaluation credited it with avoiding roughly 1,190 deaths a year. Odisha, which built India's first state heat plan after the 1998 heatwave, targets the most vulnerable using socioeconomic data; Rajasthan pioneered a rural-focused approach. Abroad, Freetown appointed Africa's first chief heat officer, and Seville became the first city to name and categorise heatwaves by health impact. The expertise is reachable, through the WHO-WMO Global Heat Health Information Network, the Arsht-Rock Resilience Center, and, at home, the NDMA and the Ministry of Health's National Programme on Climate Change and Human Health.

A whole-of-government duty, and community at every level

Extreme heat is the textbook problem no single ministry can own, which is why it falls between them. Disaster management (NDMA and state authorities) already leads on Heat Action Plans; health (MoHFW, NCDC and NPCCHH) runs heat-illness surveillance and hospital preparedness; the IMD issues forecasts and alerts; labour owns the OSHWC Code and its rules; and housing, power, environment, finance and local bodies each hold a piece. A genuine whole-of-government response means each proactively owning its slice and sharing expertise, with a named coordinator, on the global chief heat officer model, so accountability is assigned rather than diluted. India's State and District Task Forces on Climate Change and Human Health already exist to convene these actors. Beneath government, the response must be co-designed with those most exposed: ASHAs and anganwadi workers, the NDMA's Aapda Mitra volunteers, unions and employer associations, local bodies and women's self-help groups. Ahmedabad worked because it was built with slum communities, not handed down to them.

Adaptation is not enough

All of the above is adaptation. It is necessary and insufficient. The IPCC is unambiguous that limiting warming near 1.5 degrees Celsius requires global emissions to fall about 43 percent by 2030 and reach net-zero carbon dioxide around 2050. India's Panchamrit pledges and net-zero-by-2070 commitment are real, as is its fair claim to climate justice under common but differentiated responsibilities, since the historic emissions driving today's heat were overwhelmingly not ours. But pledges are not reductions, and the finance and technology long promised to the global South remain the missing half of the bargain. Heat is only the most immediate face of a wider cascade of rising seas, melting Himalayan glaciers and food insecurity. Adaptation decides how many survive the heat already here; mitigation decides how much worse it gets.

India's extreme heat is being governed as a climate crisis. It is equally a labour and public health crisis, and that distinction is precisely the difference between an advisory and an enforceable right. The WHO gives us the framework, the Supreme Court the principle, Ahmedabad and Seville the templates, and our own ministries and frontline workers the machinery. What remains is the will to bind it together with clear liability, and to reach the people most exposed to the heat and least heard in the making of the law.

Purva Singh is a public health law and policy advisor and the founder of Bhagwani Consultancy, Delhi NCR. A member of the Bar of Delhi (D/395/2010), she has recently published a column in the Bar & Bench, an Op-Ed in the Outlook Magazine and written in several national legal journals. She has coordinated and coauthored several chapters for the second edition of the Report on tobacco control for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Views are personal.

Key References and Hyperlinks:

1. Heat burden on garment workers: Carbon Copy - 'Heat burden on workers missing from Noida labour protest' (HeatWatch and Tata Institute of Social Sciences survey of heat-related symptoms among garment workers in Delhi NCR, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat)

2. WHO Beat the Heat Initiative: World Health Organization - Initiative against extreme heat and related environmental health risks in workplaces and major events (developed with FIFA, WMO and ILO)

3. Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020: Ministry of Labour and Employment - Full text with LiveLaw analysis of thermal and ergonomic stress provisions

4. M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024): LiveLaw - Supreme Court judgment recognising fundamental right to be free from adverse effects of climate change under Articles 21 and 14

5. Ahmedabad Heat Action Plan - Development and Evaluation: K. Knowlton, D. Mavalankar et al., 'Development and Implementation of South Asia's First Heat-Health Action Plan in Ahmedabad', IJERPH (2014); J. Hess et al., 'Pilot evaluation of the Ahmedabad Heat Action Plan' (2018)

6. IPCC AR6 emissions reduction pathways: IPCC - AR6 Working Group III press release (2022) on 43% global emissions reduction by 2030 and net-zero CO2 by 2050

7. India's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC): Government of India, Press Information Bureau - Cabinet approval of updated NDC including Panchamrit pledges and net-zero by 2070 commitment

Author is a Delhi based Public Health Law and Policy Advisor. Views are personal.