Tamil Nadu's lukewarm heatwave policy

On October 15, the Tamil Nadu government notified extreme heat as a state-specific disaster. For a long time and on the occasion of many disasters, many politicians have been happy to point to natural causes and presume none of their own actions or the actions of other people could be held responsible when people were killed. The public, political, and bureaucratic awareness of climate change hasn’t bucked this trend and in fact may have bolstered it. As the refrain has gone (roughly): “If people die during a heatwave, it’s climate change’s fault for making that amount of heat likelier than it would be otherwise. Nothing I could have done about it.”

We heard it during the COVID-19 pandemic, too. When the delta strain of the SARS-2 virus ripped through populations in North India in early 2021, politicians in power only admitted the virus had become deadlier, not that they’d failed to prevent overcrowding, prepare their healthcare systems, invest in health workers, stock up on drugs, support people whose livelihoods would be threatened by working from home, etc.

With finger-pointing having become a cornerstone of political practice in India, the Tamil Nadu government’s new policy could stick in one’s teeth. As things stand today, the state’s decision is good because it allows those at risk of heat-related morbidity or -mortality to avail institutional mechanisms and recompense in the event of a deadly heatwave. The decision expands the state’s responsibility to guarantee public welfare to the new and unique threats posed by climate change. But there are also reasons to wait and watch.

For one, does the new policy in any way imply or presume deadly heat is entirely a natural disaster and that the state can’t be blamed for it? The gazette notification says the Tamil Nadu government will provide “medical care including supply of oral rehydration solution packets” and provide “drinking water in water kiosks”. These are incentives in the policy, but there are no sanctions should the state fail to act appropriately or in the event that these measures are deemed insufficient. In fact, the next paragraph in the notification is more illuminating:

The appropriate authority shall diagnose the heat-related death based on a history of exposure to high ambient temperature and the reasonable exclusion of other causes of hyperthermia. Moreover, diagnosis shall be established from the circumstance surrounding the death, investigative reports concerning environmental temperature, and/or measured ante-mortem body temperature at the time of collapse and declaration of death due to heat wave shall be made accordingly. It shall be ensured that the data related to heat stroke and heat stroke deaths are reported in IHIP-NPCCHH (Integrated Health Information Platform – National Programme on Climate Change and Human Health).

The stipulation to record deaths resulting from heat injuries as such is commendable. This data is currently hard to find at the national level, but only because the national government hasn’t endeavoured to keep track and not because this is a difficult exercise. This said, estimates of a heatwave’s deadliness are typically based on the extent to which the ambient temperature deviates from the historical average at a specific location and the number of lives lost during and because of the heatwave.

This is a tricky, even devious, combination as illustrated by the accompanying rider: “to the reasonable exclusion of other causes of hyperthermia”. A heatwave injures and/or kills by first pushing those more vulnerable people and/or ecosystems over the edge; the less vulnerable are further down the line. The state is responsible for pulling people back from such states of vulnerability and reducing their exposure to risk — and the new policy is presumably designed to help the state catch those whose risk exposure the state hasn’t been able to mitigate in time. However, the goal shouldn’t be to catch all of them; it should be to altogether reduce the number of people requiring such catching. The policy lacks the instruments to guide the state towards this outcome.

This detail serves an important reminder: this is well begun, and well begun is half done. But only half. Bearing in mind governments’ penchant for stopping with the beginning as well as for taking an insular, isolationist view of the ways in which climate change affects the people, there’s value in reminding ourselves what’s left to be done and why that’s important — so important, in fact, that if they aren’t done, the half-done part could come to nought as well.

As a second example, the policy skirts around the state’s responsibility by limiting itself to the consequences of a heatwave or a heatwave declaration, and doesn’t mitigate the deadliness of high heat in advance and in contexts that step beyond climate change. Such inaction could potentially facilitate a disaster, risking people’s lives even before the ambient temperature has crossed legally recognised thresholds. For example, if a doctor concludes a person died of a heat-related injury because they couldn’t ventilate themselves and/or couldn’t consume cool water in time, and yet the weather department hasn’t declared a heatwave, the person’s family won’t qualify to receive the ex-gratia solatium in Tamil Nadu’s new policy. In other words, the policy won’t catch these people — and yet these are the same people who are likelier than others to be injured or killed during a heatwave.

Third and on a related note, if a person dies during a (declared) heatwave, the ambient heat itself will be less responsible for stressing an individual than the heat interacting with preexisting vulnerabilities (especially among children and the elderly) and comorbidities. At the least, the Tamil Nadu health department should clarify the interaction between high heat and comorbidities and which of the latter will and won’t disqualify families from receiving the solatium. This way the state’s own hand will also come into view — just as it did when the Indian government blamed comorbidities in 2020 to artificially keep the official number of deaths due to COVID-19 down.

Fourth, the Tamil Nadu government has adopted a climate change mission that could address some of the anthropogenic components responsible for aggravating heatwaves — such as denuded green spaces and deteriorating natural water drainage capacity — but there’s another kind of risk here: one of time. Actions to mitigate climate change and to adapt to a future with it are characteristically long term, whereas keeping a heatwave from being deadlier has many short-term solutions such as better urban planning (especially providing for ventilation and 24/7 access to clean, cool water), improving access to green spaces (while preventing gentrification), better enforcement of working conditions rules in the informal sector, etc. The state shouldn’t forget this.

For now the Rs 4 lakh emolument is effectively a self-imposed penalty on the state’s failure to lower its peoples’ vulnerability to heat injury, at the expense of the State Disaster Response Fund. Tamil Nadu has been more forward-thinking on some fronts than most other states and the new policy is another example, but many states — including Tamil Nadu — have often fallen short on the ground or slowed down after loudly announcing new plans. There’s lots to wait and watch out for here.