HeatWatch is strengthening awareness, capacity, and accountability to push better decision-making and action in a dangerously hot country.
HeatWatch works at the intersection of economic and social justice, public health, urban planning and climate adaptation to document how heat disproportionately affects vulnerable workers and communities. Through data, research, training, advocacy, and partnerships, we push for practical, ground-up solutions that make heat resilience more equitable and effective.
Our Work
Garment workers operate on factory floors that trap heat, working next to machines that run at extreme temperatures. We study how heat stress affects workers on the factory floor and identify the standards the industry needs to meet.
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Construction workers labour in open sites through India's hottest months with little access to shade, rest breaks or cooling infrastructure. HeatWatch studies the health risks they carry and builds the case for enforceable protections.
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Domestic workers work inside homes across Indian cities, often in poorly-ventilated spaces with little control over their hours or conditions. We look at how rising temperatures shape their daily lives and what meaningful protection for invisible workforce could look like.
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Waste workers begin their rounds before sunrise and work through the heat with limited access to water, sanitation and shade. HeatWatch studies how rising temperatures affect their health and income, and works with them to understand what safer work would actually look like.
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Platform workers navigate urban streets in peak heat with little access to shade, rest or basic facilities. We study how extreme heat shapes their livelihoods and identify the protections needed in the platform economy.
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Garment workers operate on factory floors that trap heat, working next to machines that run at extreme temperatures. HeatWatch has developed an interactive dashboard integrating temperature data with factory-level insights from India's textile and garment sector, visualising worker heat exposure and mapping brand supply chains to highlight the need for stronger human rights protections.
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Public parks are natural cooling spaces. But across Bengaluru city, parks shut their gates between 11 AM and 4 PM, precisely when temperatures are at their highest. HeatWatch is campaigning to keep parks open and accessible to everyone who needs shade, rest and relief the most.
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India's cities are getting hotter, but cooling infrastructure remains sparse and inaccessible. We are building a nationwide map of cooling centres to document where they exist and where the gaps are the largest.
Help map cooling spacesReports
HeatWatch's latest report explores how extreme heat is affecting the health, livelihoods, and working conditions of women platform workers in Delhi NCR, and why heat must be recognised as a labour, gender, and public health issue.
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This report by HeatWatch in collaboration with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, is based on our research with 115 garment factory workers in Tamil Nadu and Delhi and interviews with factory management across 15 garment and textile units in Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, Faridabad and Noida in Delhi-NCR, and Surat in Gujarat to establish a baseline of physical infrastructure, operational policies, and health and safety systems.
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Heatwatch and Hasiru Dala have launched a new report exploring the growing threat of extreme heat in Bengaluru and its disproportionate impact on waste workers.
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In stark contrast to official figures reporting just 14 confirmed heat-related deaths in India between March and June 2025, this report documents 84 suspected heatstroke-related deaths. These findings were compiled from a systematic review of media reports across national and regional languages, using both AI-assisted searches and manual data collection to capture local coverage likely missed by government estimates.
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HeatWatch found that between March and June, there have been 733 deaths due to heatstroke in 17 states in India. This data is more than twice the number presented by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in the recent Lok Sabha session.
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This report presents a comprehensive study on the effects of extreme heat on Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers in Haryana, exploring their work conditions, health challenges, and institutional support.
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