A driver sleeps inside his auto rickshaw parked in the the shade of a tree as the city continues to be gripped by a heat wave, in New Delhi, India, Tuesday, June 18, 2024. A monthslong heat wave across swathes of India has killed more than 100 people and led to over 40,000 suspected cases of heat stroke in the last three and a half months, a Health Ministry official said Thursday.
| Photo Credit: AP

Months of scorching temperatures sometimes over 50 degrees C in parts of India this year — its worst heat wave in over a decade — left hundreds dead or ill. But the official number of deaths listed in government reports barely scratches the surface of the true toll and that’s affecting future preparations for similar swelters, according to public health experts.

India now has a bit of respite from the intense heat, and a different set of extreme weather problems as monsoon rain lashes the northeast, but for months the extreme heat took a toll on large swaths of the country, particularly in northern India, where government officials reported at least 110 heat-related deaths.

Public health experts say the true number of heat-related deaths is likely in the thousands but because heat is often not listed as a reason on a death certificate many heat deaths don’t get counted in official figures. The worry, they say, is that undercounting the deaths means the heat wave problem isn’t as prioritized as it should be, and officials are missing out on ways to prepare their residents for the scorching temperatures.

All of India’s warmest years on record have been in the last decade. Studies by public health experts found that up to 1,116 people have died every year between 2008 and 2019 due to heat.

As part of his work in public health, Srinath Reddy, the founder of the Public Health Foundation of India, has advised state governments on how to factor in heat when recording deaths.

He found that as a result of “incomplete reporting, delayed reporting and misclassification of deaths,” heat-related deaths are significantly undercounted around the country. Despite national guidelines for recording deaths, many doctors — especially those in overcrowded public hospitals where resources are already strained — don’t follow it, he said.

“Most doctors just record the immediate cause of death and attribution to environmental triggers like heat are not recorded,” Reddy said. That’s because heat deaths can be classified as exertional or non-exertional: Exertional is when a person dies due to direct exposure to high temperatures and non-exertional is when young children, older people or people with pre-existing health conditions become seriously ill or sometimes die from the heat, even if indoors.

“The heatwave is the final straw for the second category of people,” said Dileep Mavalankar, former head of the Indian Institute of Public Health in Gandhinagar. “Most people dying during heat waves belong to this category but their deaths are not recorded as connected to the heat.”

Mavalankar agreed the official number of heat deaths this year is an undercount. He said there were 40,000 recorded case of heat stroke, but only 110 deaths. “This is just 0.3% of the total number of heatstroke cases recorded, but usually heat deaths should be 20 to 30% of heatstroke cases,” he said.

“We need to be counting deaths better,” Mavalankar said. “That is the only way we will know how severe the consequences of extreme heat are.”

In his former role at the Indian Institute of Public Health in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, Mavalankar was instrumental in developing India’s first-ever heat action plan for the city of Ahmedabad in 2013, three years after more than 1,300 people died there during a heat wave.

The heat plan included measures like increasing access to shaded areas for outdoor workers, converting relatively cool public buildings to temporary shelters for people without homes or access to electricity and ensuring hospitals have adequate medical supplies and staff during heat waves.

In the years that followed, Mavalankar and his team studied the impact of the heat plan by counting death tolls in subsequent hot summers. Because of a lack of data on heat deaths specifically, the team looked at deaths from all causes, which spikes during heat waves, and used the number of excess deaths to determine how many deaths were likely caused by heat.

They estimate that the heat action plan had helped reduce the number of fatalities during heat waves by up to 40%.

Having that data, while imperfect, Mavalankar said, allowed the city to adequately prepare itself for extreme heat, and do more of what worked in the future.

But he said the lack of data elsewhere makes it difficult to replicate the results in Ahmedabad on a national level.

“Not reporting these deaths, sharing data, is like the Indian Meteorological Department not sharing weather data,” he said. “We can easily do this across the country but we’ve not decided that we should do it.”

The Indian government collects data on heat-related deaths through the health ministry’s National Centre for Disease Control which is then shared with the National Disaster Management Agency. The agency then shares the data as a total nationwide figure for the year, but a state by state breakdown is not publicly available.

The National Crime Records Bureau also collects heat-related death data as part of their accounting of deaths due to “forces of nature” and publishes those figures.

But there are huge discrepancies. In 2020, the last year with publicly available data on heat deaths from both official sources, the crime records bureau recorded 530 deaths from heatstroke, but the disaster agency reported just four heat-related deaths.

The Associated Press contacted India’s health ministry spokesperson, the NCDC and the NDMA to comment on the discrepancy but did not receive a response.

Getting better data can answer a whole host of questions about who is most vulnerable and how best to help them, said Bharghav Krishna, a public health expert and a fellow at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative thinktank, “especially with respect to identifying who is dying, where they’re dying, what are they doing when they’re dying.”

Krishna thinks that the data currently collected, while inadequate, can at least provide some insight for policymakers and researchers and force at least some action if its shared with the right people.

But Malavankar said the issues of data collection are more systemic, and that needs to be urgently addressed.

“We have not done a national census since 2011, not having numbers is our national weakness,” he said.

New Delhi:

The Election Commission has asked concerned Chief Electoral Officers and state authorities to take adequate measures to manage the adverse impact of hot weather or rainfall wherever predicted in the sixth phase of Lok Sabha polls.

The poll panel has made adequate arrangements for the Phase 6 of the Lok Sabha polls to be held on Saturday.

Polling is scheduled in 58 PCs across eight states/UTs. Haryana and NCT of Delhi will head to polls in this phase. Bihar, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal are the other states/UTs which will continue with their polls in this phase. Polling for 42 assembly constituencies for the Odisha State Legislative Assembly will also take place simultaneously.

The poll panel said that polling stations are ready to welcome the voters with ample shade, drinking water, ramps, toilets, and other basic facilities to ensure that polling takes place in a comfortable and secure environment.

Polling parties have been dispatched along with machines and poll materials to their respective polling stations.

The Commission has called upon voters to turn out in large numbers at polling stations and vote with responsibility and pride.

“Voters of PCs in urban centres like Delhi, Gurgaon, Faridabad are specially reminded about their right and duty to vote and break the trend of urban apathy,” Election Commission said in a release.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Watch | Earth Day: wake-up call on climate change

In this episode, we will be discussing Earth Day, which The Hindu covered with thematic articles on April 22.

We look at multiple dimensions of climate change, beginning with the most recent Supreme Court ruling on climate change in terms of the rights of us citizens of India to have protection from the deleterious impact of climate change.

We look at heatwave projections for the entire Asia region in terms of what impact it could have on livelihoods, employment etc. We will also look at how algorithms can be used to project future droughts and floods across the region. And finally, we touch on the critical issue of water management and why it matters in the context of water-food-land nexus which together has an enormous impact on the economy.

We are joined by Jacob Koshy, the Deputy Science Editor at The Hindu.

Host: Narayan Lakshman

Guest: Jacob Koshy

Production: Richard Kujur

Concurrent occurrences of heatwaves and extreme short-term sea level rise at the same coastal locations significantly increased between 1998 and 2017 when compared to the preceding twenty years, as per a study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. The study also suggests that these events may be five times more likely to occur between 2025 and 2049 under a modelled high emissions scenario.

A so-called ‘concurrent heatwave and extreme sea level’ (CHWESL) event is when a heatwave and an extreme short-term sea level rise occur at the same coastal location over the same time period. This can pose a serious threat to coastal communities. Yet, there has so far been little research into the characteristics and occurrences of these events.

Shuo Wang and Mo Zhou from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, investigated CHWESL events worldwide between 1979 and 2017 and projected future events between 2025 and 2049 under a high emissions climate scenario (the IPCC’s SSP5-8.5 scenario). The authors only included events occurring in the extended summer season, spanning May to September in the Northern Hemisphere, and November to March in the Southern Hemisphere.

The authors found that approximately 88% of the world’s coastlines experienced a CHWESL event during the period 1979-2017. Approximately 39% of coastlines recorded a significant increase in the total duration of CHWESL conditions experienced over a year during the period 1998-2017 compared to during 1979-1998, with tropical regions more likely to experience a greater increase. The authors also found a significant association between heatwave intensity and the probability of a CHWESL event occurring, with a 1% increase in heatwave intensity associated with an approximately 2% increase in the probability of a CHWESL event occurring. From their projections, the authors suggest that global coastal areas could experience on average 38 days of CHWESL conditions each year between 2025 and 2049, an increase of 31 days compared to the historical period of 1989-2013.

The authors conclude that CHWESL events could pose a significant threat to coastal communities, particularly from the risks of excess heat to human health. They note that countries in tropical areas are likely to be the most severely affected, and that many of these countries are low or middle-income countries which may struggle to cope with the effects.