Inder Kumar, a 25-year-old contract labourer from Chattarpur in Madhya Pradesh, recently spent more than a week bedridden with heat-stress fever — unpaid, uncompensated, and unable to stop for long. His situation is not exceptional. According to new analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development, shared exclusively with The Guardian, it is a pattern repeated across hundreds of millions of lives each summer in India. The IIED study found that workers in physically demanding informal sectors — agriculture, construction and transport — lost an average of 6.

6% of their annual salaries in 2024 because extreme heat forced them to slow down or stop altogether. Those who work entirely outdoors fared worst, losing close to 9% of their income, equivalent to roughly $151 over the year. In Rajasthan's arid desert belt, where heatwaves are both prolonged and increasingly deadly, the income loss reached 8.3%.

Across India as a whole, researchers calculated that 21.1 working days were lost per worker per year — an amount that many families simply cannot absorb. The consequences compound quickly. Ritu Bharadwaj, climate finance director at IIED, describes heat as a "poverty multiplier": lower earnings reduce food intake, which reduces productivity further, while workers continue labouring through dangerous temperatures because they cannot afford to rest.

The IIED estimates that heat-related losses could cost the Indian economy at least £58 billion — around 2% of GDP — when reduced productivity and wage losses are combined. A World Bank report has previously warned that India could become one of the first countries where peak heatwaves exceed the limits of human survivability. Nine out of every ten workers in India are employed informally, with no sick pay, no climate insurance, and no political constituency powerful enough to demand either.