Root Privileges

India and physics, sometimes together. Online since 2012.

Tag: heat-related illness

  • Right to safe work

    The maximum daytime temperatures in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi districts of Karnataka this week are expected to be 41º C and in the late 30sº C, respectively. Research has found that if the relative humidity is high enough to render a wet-bulb temperature exceeding 30º C, outdoor exposure of even a few minutes can prove fatal.

    Yet many workers, especially in the country’s informal sector, routinely work outdoors in extreme heat with poor access to clean cool water, breaks from work, and medical attention. State-level policies and district-level heat-action plans are crucial to catch individuals who ‘slip’ through the protections available to the formal labour force.

    In this spirit, Tamil Nadu and Telangana recently notified extreme heat as a state-specific disaster. Earlier this month, Karnataka also said government offices would close by 1.30 pm in April and May and that workers employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi revenue divisions — comprising 14 districts — would receive a workload concession of 30% without any reduction in wages. From The Hindu:

    “Labourers who work in open fields during the summer months are advised to take precautions such as wearing loose cotton clothes and consuming buttermilk, coconut water, and green vegetables instead of spicy food, tea, coffee, and junk food. They should drink enough clean water. The officers concerned are also directed to provide the workers with clean drinking water, first aid box, tent, and other basic facilities at the MGNREGA worksite,” [State Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister Priyank Kharge] said in a press note.

    The decision aims to protect rural labourers from the harshest heat during working hours.

    These initiatives are all on the right track because they’re cognisant of the fact that climate change will force the cost of economic growth to increase. For example, sans the concession granted by Karnataka — a notably substantive state-level policy for working in less-than-ideal conditions — workers may have had to set aside a larger fraction of their incomes to pay for medical care for heat-related injuries.

    However, some media outlets have since cited a recent survey by a non-governmental organisation, ActionAid India, to report that many workers in Belagavi were unaware of the state’s announcement nor had been accorded the promised infrastructure. From Deccan Herald:

    Out of 124 recently surveyed workers in 10 villages from Chikkodi taluk, Belagavi, 72.5 per cent of people work between 10 am and 5 pm and in 68.5 per cent of cases, no tented or shaded areas were provided where workers could take a break. …

    In Raichur, where temperatures in the day can reach anywhere between 42 to 45 degrees Celsius, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) workers continue to start their shifts only at 10 am, working through peak-time heat. …

    Additionally, considering extreme heat conditions, the government had announced a 30 per cent concession on workload, with full payment, for workers in the Belagavi and Kalaburagi revenue divisions. This includes Belagavi, Dharwad, Gadag, Haveri, Bagalkot, Vijayapura, Uttara Kannada, Bidar, Kalaburagi, Raichur, Yadgir, Koppal, Ballari and Vijayanagar. However, the survey notes that 75 per cent of surveyed workers were not aware of such a provision and were not provided with any concession.

    “We have found that when such workload concessions are announced, only those who are aware and ask are provided with concessions,” says Mahantesh Hosamani, an activist from Bagalkot.

    Aside from leaving the Act’s beneficiaries bereft of social protections, the lacuna recalls that the enforcement of state- and district-level plans remains at the mercy of local bureaucrats and that there is no democratic mechanism to ensure state governments keep their promises. In this way, the additional cost imposed by extreme weather is passed to a population already dangerously vulnerable to high heat and the social welfare dimensions of climate adaptation efforts continue to stay on paper. As science journalist Mahima Jain reported in Mongabay India in 2022:

    Despite the strong evidence of climate impacts, the state and central governments are not ready to combat these issues as there are institutional changes required to fight against, Prakash said. … During summer, workers avoid working in the heat by starting before dawn and finishing by late mornings. “We need an MGNREGS plus. We need to move on from such a knee-jerk solution, as this can’t go on for years. People need to be upskilled, we need agro-based or other industries set up in the vulnerable areas so that people have alternate employment,” Prakash explained…

    Goswami too said that during heatwaves, the nature of work has to change. “We need to provide work which can be done in some shade. The working conditions are inhuman. How does one work in 49-50C?” he asked. Prakash explained, currently none of India’s social protection programmes have a climate angle. These are general programmes protecting people from different vulnerabilities. But given India’s diverse ecological zones, the impacts are different, and a one-size fits all social protection programme won’t work, and there’s a need to re-evaluate programmes from a climate lens.

    Ultimately, the Act’s goals are themselves ill-served. To quote developmental economist Gerry Rodgers writing in Economic and Political Weekly in 2024:

    … [MGNREGA] was an important part of Indira Gandhi’s 20-point programme to eliminate poverty in the early 1970s. Later in that decade, the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme changed the underlying premise from one of emergency relief to one of the right to employment, with the obligation of the state to satisfy that right. But that too was not new. The notion of the right to work has a venerable history. It is a key element of Gandhian philosophy, it is addressed in the Indian Constitution, and it is included in the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. …

    In the literature and news reports, there are also suggestions that the MGNREGA has also been used by the central government as an instrument of pressure on states governed by opposition parties, for instance, delaying allocations; or that it has been used as a vehicle to support other state policies, such as financial digitalisation or the extension of the Aadhaar card system, even when these interfered with the operation of the MGNREGA programme. Another important question about a programme such as MGNREGA is how well it integrates with other government social and redistributional policies.

    Today, rather than epitomise the ‘right to employment’, and thanks to the Centre’s repeated interference with its conduct and both the Union and state governments’ failure to upskill workers to look for less injurious employment, its workers now risk a ‘right to exploitation’.

    Featured image: MGNREGA workers remove mud from a village pond in Asir, Haryana, on February 17, 2023. Credit: Mulkh Singh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

  • Some comments on India’s heat

    On May 5, a couple people from BBC World reached out to me, presumably after reading my piece last week on the heatwave in North India and the wet-bulb temperature, for a few comments on a story they were producing on the topic. They had five questions between them; I’m reproducing my answers roughly verbatim (since I spoke to them on phone) below.

    Are these high temperatures usual?

    A: Yes and no. Yes because while these numbers are high, we’ve been hearing about them for a decade or so now – and reading about them in news reports and hearing anecdotal reports. This isn’t the first such heatwave to hit India. A few years ago, peak summer temperature in Delhi touched 47º C or so and there were photos in the media of the asphalt on the road having melted. That was worse – that hasn’t happened this time, yet. That’s the ‘yes’ part. The ‘no’ part has to do with the fact that India is a large country and some parts of the country that are becoming hotter are probably also reaching these temperatures for the first time. E.g. Bangalore, where I live, is currently daily highs of around 35º C. This is par for the course in Chennai and Delhi but it’s quite hot for Bangalore. This said, the high heat is starting sooner, on this occasion from mid-March or so itself, and lasting for longer. That has changed our experience of the heat and our exposure. Of course, my answers are limited to urban India, especially to major cities. I don’t know off the top of my head what the situation in other parts is like.

    The government has said India has a national heat plan and some cities have adopted heat action plans. Are they effective?

    Hard to say. Only two score or so cities have adopted functional heat action plans plus they’re cities, which is not where most of India lives. Sure, the heat is probably worse in the urban centres because of the heat island effect, but things are quite poor in rural areas as well, especially in the north. The heat also isn’t just heat – people experience its effects more keenly if they don’t have continuous power supply or access to running water, which is often the case in many parts of rural India. The benefits of these action plans accrue to those who are better off, typically those who are upper class and upper caste, which is hardly the point. When North India’s heatwave was underway last week, NDTV interviewed shopkeepers and small scale traders, vendors, etc. about whether they could take time off. All of them without exception said ‘no’. Come rain or shine, they need to work. I remember there being vicious cyclones in Chennai and waking up in the morning to find the roads flooded, trees fallen down and loose electric wires – and the local mobile vegetable vendor doing his rounds. Also, in urban areas, do the heat action plans account for the plights of homeless people and beggars, and people living in slums, where – even if they’re indoors – they have poor circulation and often erratic water and power supply?

    What should the government do?

    That’s a very broad question. Simply speaking, the government should give people who can’t afford to shut their businesses or take time off from work the money they’d lose if they did, and rations. This is going to be very difficult but this is what should be done. But this won’t happen. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government didn’t plan for the tens of thousands of migrant labourers and daily-wage earners in cities, who, once the lockdown came into effect, slowly migrated back to their home towns and villagers in search of livelihoods. This sector remains invisible to the government.

    [I also wanted to say but didn’t have the time:] the experience of heat is also mediated by gender, geography and caste forces, so state interventions should also be mediated by them. For example, women in particular, in rural India and especially in Central and North India (where literacy is relatively lower) operate in settings where they have few rights and little if any financial and social independence. They can seldom buy or own land and go out to work, and often labour indoors, performing domestic tasks in poorly ventilated residential spaces, venture out to fetch water from often distant sources – a task performed almost exclusively by women and girls –, often have to defecate in the open but do so early in the day or late in the evening to avoid harrassment and shame, which then means they may not drink water to avoid peeing during the day but which would render them vulnerable to heat stress, etc. If state interventions don’t bend around these realities, they will be useless.

    The moment you mention data or figures that you say you obtained from this government, the first thought that comes to mind is that it’s probably inaccurate, and likely an underestimate. Even now, the Indian government has an ongoing dispute with the WHO over the number of people who died during the pandemic in India: India is saying half a million but the WHO as well as many independent experts have said it’s probably 3-5 million. For example, if the government is collecting data of heat-related illnesses at the institutional level (from hospitals, clinics, etc.) you immediately have a bias in terms of which people are able to or intend to access healthcare when they develop a heat-related illness. Daily-wagers don’t go to hospitals unless their conditions are acute – because they’d lose a day’s earnings, because their out of pocket expenses have increased or both.

    Do you think parts of India will become unliveable in your lifetime?

    This is a good question. I’d say that ‘unliveable’ is a subjective thing. I have a friend in Seattle who recently bought a house in what she said was a nice part of the city, with lots of greenery, opportunities to go hiking and trekking on the weekend, with clear skies, clean air and large water bodies nearby. Liveability to her is different from, say, liveability to someone living in New Delhi, where the air is already quite foul, summers are very hot and winters are likely to become colder in future. Liveability means different things to people living in Delhi, London and Seattle. Many parts of India have been unliveable for a long time now, we just put up with it – and many people do because they don’t have any other option – and our bar just keeps slipping lower.