NEW DELHI – A single day of extreme heat kills about 3,400 people across India, while a five-day heatwave kills nearly 30,000, a study estimated.
Researchers Piyush Narang and Ashok Gadgil from the India Energy and Climate Center at the University of California Berkeley in the US said that although global studies highlight the high rate of heat-related deaths, precise spatial and temporal data on how heatwaves affect deaths in regions of India is still not available to mainstream researchers.
The team adapted findings from a multi-city analysis of heat-related deaths in 10 cities in India to estimate excess deaths in all regions of the country.
“Excess deaths” is a public health measure that indicates the difference between total deaths during a specific period and the deaths that would be expected to occur based on historical data.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Health, combined district-level mortality rates from the Civil Registration System and 2024 population projections to obtain district-level excess mortality estimates under one-day and five-day heat wave scenarios.
“We estimate that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally; a five-day heat wave causes approximately 30,000 excess deaths,” the researchers wrote.
A heatwave to intense heatwave prevailed in northern, central and eastern India, with temperatures constantly exceeding 45 degrees Celsius in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and parts of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana over the past few days.
Mapping the risk of heat deaths in individual regions revealed that Uttar Pradesh alone was responsible for about 8,100 excess deaths during a five-day heatwave, while excess deaths in regions, including Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Surat, exceeded 250 in every single event.
There was a 2.3-fold disparity between mortality burden and economic capacity in the five states with the highest mortality burdens – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat – which together account for 66% of the country’s excess deaths while contributing only 29% of India’s GDP.
The finding has direct and immediate implications for how India designs and finances its heat-resistant architecture, the researchers said.
“The 2.3x GDP disproportionality documented here provides a quantitative basis for arguing that federal adaptation investment, including funding under the National Disaster Management Authority and the National Climate Change Action Plan, should be weighted toward high-burden, low-GDP states rather than allocated in proportion to population or administrative capacity,” they wrote.
The researchers found that the 100 largest districts, home to nearly a third of India’s population, account for 44% of the excess deaths expected during a five-day heatwave.
Moreover, the authors said, “The risk of heatwave mortality is not only proportional to population size but is structurally concentrated in states with lower economic output, specifically those with the least financial capacity to invest in adaptation.”
They added that the region-level estimates presented in the study are consistent with findings from a growing body of epidemiological and modeling evidence that suggests that South Asia, especially India, is particularly vulnerable to heat-related deaths.
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