Extreme heat is quietly pushing women out of work

By 10 in the morning, the temperature on Meena’s MGNREGS worksite outside Jhunjhunu has already crossed 38°C. If she fails to meet her daily earthwork target, her wage is docked. If she leaves the site, she is not paid at all.

The same week temperatures in parts of Rajasthan crossed 47°C, a new government report celebrated rising female labour force participation. What it did not ask was what extreme heat is doing to that participation.

Across India's informal economy, women like Meena are increasingly working through dangerous temperatures with almost no heat-adjusted targets, labour protections, or income safeguards. India’s heat policy, meanwhile, continues to treat extreme heat as a public health emergency. Not an economic one.

The MGNREGS operational guidelines do not contain the word “heatwave”. They contain no provision for adjusted targets during IMD-declared red alerts. Some states have informally shifted work hours during severe heat events. Most have not.

No action to protect livelihoods

When the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released Women and Men in India 2025 in April, Meena’s presence on that worksite was part of the data showing rural female LFPR had risen to 45.9 percent, up from 37.5 percent in 2022. The increase was widely framed as a development success. 

But across more than 50 gender indicators, there is no measure connecting extreme heat to women's economic participation. Not because the data doesn’t exist. The PLFS records work-days. The IMD records district-level heatwave days. MGNREGS tracks attendance. Together, these datasets could produce a heat-adjusted female work-day loss indicator tomorrow. It’s just that nobody has asked for one.

If we go beyond data, and look at action, the country’s primary response appears to be the Heat Action Plan. The Ahmedabad model, developed after a deadly 2010 heatwave, genuinely saved lives: a peer-reviewed evaluation found mortality at 47°C fell measurably after the plan was introduced, and more than a hundred Indian cities have since adopted versions of it. 

But Heat Action Plans were built to prevent deaths, not protect livelihoods. They issue early warnings, open cooling centres, train hospital staff, and circulate public advisories: Stay indoors. Avoid strenuous activity between noon and four.

The advice may be medically sound, but it is directed at a population that, if it followed it, would not be able to eat. The street vendor whose earnings depend on the afternoon rush. The construction worker paid per unit of output. The agricultural labourer working through a narrow harvest window. The ASHA worker whose incentive payments depend on completing household visits in peak heat.

The consequence of such exclusions

There are approximately one million ASHA workers in India. In government language, they are classified as “volunteers” – a classification that is not incidental. 

When the programme was designed in 2005, the Ministry of Finance declined to recognise ASHA workers as full-time employees – a distinction that continues to shape everything from wages to workplace protections. Budget 2026-27 contained no change to their status, no increase in their base honorarium, no acknowledgement of heat-linked working conditions.

In practice: in May, in Bhagalpur or Ballia or Bastar, a woman travels between four and eight households a day on foot or by two-wheeler in temperatures that physiologists consider dangerous for sustained outdoor exertion. Her income depends on completing visits, surveys, follow-ups, and maternal health tracking on time. Legally, she exists in a grey zone. No employer in the formal sense, so occupational health protections don’t apply. No recognised workplace, so heat exposure frameworks designed for factories or construction sites don’t cover the route between a maize field and a mud-brick house.

For the purposes of labour protections around extreme heat, she is effectively invisible.

When ASHA workers reduce visits during heatwaves – and of course they do – the effects ripple through the public health system. Immunisation records develop gaps. Maternal health tracking becomes incomplete. Nutrition surveys fall short of coverage targets. But these are not recorded as heat-linked disruptions. They are recorded as data quality issues, administrative inefficiencies, or ASHA underperformance.

India’s public health data infrastructure depends heavily on what ASHA workers can physically manage in increasingly dangerous temperatures. But the relationship between heat exposure and the integrity of that data is almost entirely absent from policy frameworks.

Reforms are not real

The Labour Codes, consolidated in 2025, were presented as a landmark reform. For the first time, gig and platform workers were brought under social security frameworks previously limited to formal employees. But even this expanded coverage contains almost no recognition of heat-linked income vulnerability.

For example, a delivery rider who stops working because temperatures have crossed 44°C has little protection against immediate income loss. Platform companies are not required to provide heat-linked compensation. Existing labour frameworks are poorly equipped to address climate exposure in informal and app-based work. The gendered impact of this is uneven. Delivery riding remains heavily male. Platform-linked domestic work, home-care assistance, and community health roles are disproportionately female. 

And beyond even the gig economy lies a category of labour that remains almost entirely invisible within formal policy frameworks: home-based work.

Women who roll incense sticks, sort tobacco, stitch garments, or package goods from their homes often work on a piece-rate basis for contractors they may never meet directly. Their workplace is simultaneously a kitchen, a bedroom, and a production site. NFHS-5 estimates that 56.8 percent of rural Indian households still cook using biomass fuel. In a tin-roof house during peak summer, the indoor temperatures generated by biomass cooking and poor ventilation are rarely measured, despite shaping the conditions in which millions of women work every day. The state does not formally classify these kitchens as workplaces. But for many women in India's informal economy, they are exactly that.

A successful model without scale

SEWA understood early that extreme heat requires an income response, not just a public health advisory.

In 2023, the Self Employed Women’s Association launched a parametric heat insurance programme in Gujarat. By 2024, it covered fifty thousand women across Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. When temperatures cross 40°C at designated weather stations, enrolled workers receive direct cash transfers to their phones within days. No application process. No claims review. In May 2024, the programme issued payouts to more than 46,000 women during severe heatwaves.

The model works. But there is a problem of scale.

India has an estimated 250 million women in informal work. SEWA’s programme reaches 50,000 of them. The gap is a political failure, and that non-decision is best reflected if you compare Rajasthan and Kerala.

Both states are getting hotter. Rajasthan’s extreme summers are intensifying; Kerala, historically buffered by a monsoon-driven climate, is now experiencing heat stress in months that were previously temperate. But temperature alone doesn’t explain vulnerability. What matters is what each state built around women’s economic participation before the heat arrived.

Kerala has Kudumbashree: a 25-five-year-old network of 4.5 million women across self-help groups that functions as economic infrastructure and social infrastructure simultaneously. During heat events, information, support, and adaptation can move through pre-existing community systems. The state has also classified heatwaves as a state-specific disaster, allowing disaster relief funds to be deployed for heat response.

Rajasthan enters the same crisis from a very different starting point. Its rural female workforce remains heavily concentrated in subsistence agriculture – among the most heat-exposed forms of labour in India. Gender literacy gaps are high, mobility constraints are significant, collective support infrastructure is thin. Rajasthan has not classified heatwaves as a state-specific disaster, which limits access to relief funding without a central declaration.

Solutions exist, but action is missing

Heat is not neutral. It falls hardest on places where economic and institutional vulnerability already existed long before the temperature rose. There are immediate interventions available that require neither new institutions nor major legislative reform.

The Ministry of Rural Development could amend MGNREGS operational guidelines so that work shifts and productivity targets automatically adjust during IMD-declared heatwave periods. Some states already do this informally. A national directive would standardise protections that currently depend on the discretion of individual programme officers.

State health departments and women and child development departments could adjust ASHA and Anganwadi targets during extreme heat events while protecting incentive payments for workers unable to safely complete field visits.

The Ministry of Statistics could introduce a heat-adjusted female work-day loss indicator into official labour reporting by combining datasets that already exist across the PLFS, IMD, and MGNREGS systems. None of this requires new technological capacity. 

The data as well as the administrative mechanisms largely exist. But India’s heat policy still treats extreme heat primarily as a public health emergency, even as its economic consequences are increasingly being absorbed by informal workers with the fewest protections and the least financial resilience.

The writer is an independent policy researcher.

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