India's Heat Resilience Strategy Must Recognise Gendered Health Burden, Experts Say

Women in India carry a disproportionate and underacknowledged health burden from rising heat stress, yet climate and public health policy frameworks have been slow to address the gendered dimension of extreme heat. Researchers and health experts argue that building national climate resilience requires a healthcare system that explicitly recognises heat as a gendered public health emergency.

Women's bodies respond differently to heat stress at a physiological level. Hormonal fluctuations, body composition and metabolic rates all affect thermoregulation, making women more susceptible to dehydration, fatigue and heat-related illness. Pregnant women face elevated risk due to the additional physiological demands of pregnancy. Women engaged in outdoor agricultural and domestic labour have disproportionately high exposure, while those managing households without air conditioning face sustained heat stress through the day and night.

India's rapidly warming climate is intensifying this disparity. Prolonged heat waves are now altering everyday life across the country's plains and coastal belts, straining labour productivity and public health infrastructure. Policy frameworks have only recently begun acknowledging the connection between reproductive health, occupational exposure and heat events. The absence of sex-disaggregated health data for heat-related illness makes it difficult to design targeted interventions or measure their effectiveness.

Health experts are calling for India's National Action Plan on Climate Change and state-level Heat Action Plans to incorporate gendered vulnerability assessments and targeted health outreach for women. Strengthening community health infrastructure, including female health workers equipped to identify and respond to heat illness, would improve frontline response. Longer term, urban planning policies that reduce heat exposure in residential and agricultural settings are essential to close the climate-health equity gap.

Key figure — India's plains and coastal belts now experiencing prolonged extreme heat spells