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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Environment
Carmen Aguilar García and Antonio Voce in London; Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan in Delhi

‘When I get home, my whole body aches’: extreme heat saps health and wages of India’s poorest workers

Labourers work on top of a building as the sun sets during a heatwave in Srinagar.
Workers in highly physical jobs in some sectors lost on average 6.6% of their salaries in 2024 due to extreme heat, analysis found. Photograph: Saqib Majeed/Sopa Images/Shutterstock

Extreme heat is pushing some of India’s poorest workers further into poverty, with income losses of up to 9% for outdoor workers, new research has found.

Analysis done by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that extreme heat is acting as a “poverty multiplier” for hundreds of millions of workers in India’s informal sector.

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