Extreme heat pushes India's poorest workers deeper into poverty, costing up to 9% of wages

On a construction site in Gurugram, just outside Delhi, Inder Kumar mixes cement in the brutal afternoon heat. His wife Laxmi carries bricks and lays them into walls. They work eight to ten hours a day, earning 800 rupees—about six pounds—each. In the past three months, they have fallen ill three times. Each illness costs them days of wages they cannot afford to lose, and money they do not have for medicine. They keep working anyway, because stopping means their two young sons and four other family members back home in Madhya Pradesh go hungry.

New research from the International Institute for Environment and Development reveals the scale of what is happening to Inder, Laxmi, and hundreds of millions of workers like them across India. Outdoor workers lost close to 9% of their annual salary in 2024 due to extreme heat. Those in physically demanding jobs—agriculture, construction, transport—lost an average of 6.6% of their income. In Rajasthan, where heatwaves are relentless and death tolls are rising, informal workers lost the equivalent of 8.3% of their earnings. The research estimates that across India's 550 million informal sector workers, extreme heat erased 21.1 working days per person in a single year. For families living paycheck to paycheck, this is not a statistic. It is the difference between eating and going hungry.

The mechanism is simple and brutal. Heat makes the body less efficient. Workers cannot maintain their pace. Employers close worksites when temperatures spike. Illness forces absences. But the consequences spiral. Lower income means less food. Malnutrition weakens the body further. Workers cannot afford to rest, so they return to work sick, damaging their health more deeply. Ritu Bharadwaj, climate finance director at the IIED, describes it as heat acting as a "poverty multiplier." The poorest are paying for a climate crisis they did not cause, with their wages and their bodies.

The human toll is visible in the stories of those enduring it. Laxmi described the sensation of her body feeling like it was on fire. Doctors told her and Inder they were suffering from dehydration and heat exhaustion and needed rest. They could not afford to listen. After losing eight days of wages, they returned to work. Their shelter—a 2.5-meter square of tarpaulin inside an unfinished building—offers no relief. In the evening, the diesel generators powering the fan are switched off an hour after they return from work, leaving them to sleep in stifling heat. Laxmi still has to cook, making the room hotter. "It feels like we work and sleep inside an oven," she said.

For women, the burden is often heavier. Many spend their working day caring for young children while also laboring. Kumkumari, 35, pours water over her two-year-old daughter to cool her down—the only method available. When her daughter falls sick, Kumkumari loses work days she cannot spare. The research found that eight construction workers who spoke to the Guardian had all fallen ill repeatedly over four months. Some collapsed and sustained serious injuries but received no compensation. Some were refused pay entirely.

The long-term health consequences are severe and largely invisible until they are not. Prolonged heat exposure and repeated dehydration increase the risk of chronic kidney disease. The IIED estimates that over years of repeated exposure, one in every 20 informal workers in India could develop the condition—more than 26 million people. Sattavir, 38, is already experiencing this. In the past two months, he worked only eight days after developing a kidney infection brought on by heat and dehydration. He spent 9,000 rupees on medicine and treatment but earned only 7,000. He is now in debt and still searching for work, though doctors say he needs treatment. When contractors see a worker is weak, they do not hire him. After waiting hours in the sun, Sattavir went home empty-handed for the third consecutive day.

The economic scale is staggering. The IIED research estimates that heat could cost the Indian economy at least 58 billion pounds annually—equivalent to 2% of GDP—through lost wages, worksite closures, and long-term losses from heat-related illness. This occurs as India aims to become a developed nation within two decades. The World Bank has warned that India could become one of the first places where heatwaves break the human survivability limit. The research accounts for three mechanisms: heat-related illness, reduced work capacity and productivity, and time lost when worksites close. Informal workers, who make up nine out of every ten workers in India, lack employment security, health insurance, and the ability to refuse unsafe conditions. Access to drinking water, shade, rest areas, sanitation, and medical support at worksites is poor. Many return to homes that provide no relief from heat.

Inder's prayer is simple: "I just pray this heat ends. It's torture." But the heat is not ending. Human-caused climate breakdown is making every heatwave more intense and more likely. For workers like Inder and Laxmi, for Sattavir and Kumkumari, the crisis is not coming. It is here, measured in lost wages, in fever and body aches, in children crying in the heat, in debt that grows faster than savings, in kidneys failing from dehydration, in the slow, grinding descent deeper into poverty with each passing summer.