The Quint is telling the full story of how climate change is reshaping lives in India. Help us do more. Become a member.On the morning of 18 May, a data dashboard tracking real-time temperatures across the world showed Prayagraj, Banda, and Mirzapur sitting at the top of a global list of hottest cities. All three are in Uttar Pradesh. Four days later, on 22 May, every single city in the world's top 50 hottest places was in India, and UP dominated that list. Cities like Varanasi, Ayodhya, Banda, Bareilly, and Prayagraj were clocking 42 to 44 degrees by mid-morning.This is not a new phenomenon. It is a deepening one. And it is happening in cities that are largely invisible in the national conversation about extreme heat.When heatwaves make headlines in India, the coverage typically begins and ends at Delhi—Delhi's hospitals, Delhi's heat index, Delhi's cooling centres, and Delhi's action plan. This is not to say Delhi's suffering is not real. But the framing leaves tens of millions of people in other states, particularly in UP's secondary cities unseen, under-resourced, and dangerously exposed.Why 'Super' El Niño Alone Can’t Explain India's Extreme Heat This YearThe Records Nobody Wants to CelebrateOn 17 June 2024, Prayagraj recorded 47.6 degrees Celsius, making it the hottest city in the entire country that day. The previous day it had touched 47.1 degrees. On 15 June, the night had offered no respite: the minimum temperature hit 34.3 degrees Celsius, breaking a 127-year record. The previous record was 33.5 degrees Celsius, set in June 1898.Prayagraj has long been prone to record-breaking heat. Even before, on 29 April 2022, the city reached 46.8°C—the highest April temperature ever recorded in India at the time, breaking a 23-year-old record. The next day, temperatures remained exceptionally high at 46.1°C, around six degrees above normal. Even before summer had officially arrived, Prayagraj was already experiencing historic heat.In 2026, the trend continues. The Indian Meteorological Department forecasts for the week of 22 May projected Prayagraj's temperatures between 46 and 48 degrees Celsius across consecutive days.Prayagraj is not a small town. It is home to roughly 1.5 million people and holds significant cultural and religious importance. And yet, in the politics of climate governance, it exists in a gap between the urgency Delhi commands and the policy infrastructure Prayagraj deserves.Why Can’t India Get its Heatwave Mortality Data Right?When the Heat Turns WetFor decades, Prayagraj was classified as a dry-heat zone. High temperatures were brutal, but the low humidity meant the body could still sweat and cool itself. This has since changed. Research cited by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) found that relative humidity across the Indo-Gangetic Plain has increased by up to 10 percent over the last decade. Prayagraj sits directly in this belt.Cities like Kanpur and Varanasi, previously in the dry-heat category, now see humidity levels that compound thermal stress far beyond what temperature alone conveys.This matters for one fundamental reason: when body temperature rises above 37 degrees Celsius, sweating is the primary mechanism through which the body cools itself. High humidity prevents sweat from evaporating. The body overheats faster and recovers more slowly. Medical researchers describe this as wet-bulb stress—and it is significantly more dangerous than the dry heat that historical temperature records were built on.At the same time, the urban heat island (UHI) effect is compounding the problem in ways that Prayagraj's residents experience, but policy frameworks have yet to fully account for. Research tracking 44 major Indian cities found a consistent and statistically significant rise in nighttime surface temperatures of 0.64 degrees Celsius per decade from 2000 to 2017. The city absorbs heat through concrete and asphalt during the day and releases it slowly through the night, leaving urban residents with far less recovery time than people in nearby rural areas.A 2024 study published in Nature Cities found that urbanisation drives up to 60 percent additional warming in Indian cities. A separate study published in February 2026 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that medium-sized cities in India could face an additional warming of 0.7 to 0.8 degrees Celsius above their surrounding rural areas under a 2-degree global warming scenario, with cities in the monsoon-influenced belt of north India listed among the most vulnerable. A research paper from IIT Kharagpur specifically quantified the UHI effect in Kanpur, another city in the Gangetic belt, and found that nighttime air temperature differences between the urban core and surrounding rural areas reached up to 3.6 degrees Celsius in pre-monsoon months. The same physics applies to Prayagraj, where rapid paving of green spaces and wetlands since the early 2000s, documented in a 2024 ScienceDirect study on land use change, has steadily shrunk the city's natural cooling capacity.Manoj Joshi of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who co-authored the PNAS study, explained to The Quint that these cities are particularly vulnerable because monsoon moisture, which normally cools the land surface, gets neutralised in built-up urban environments where green cover is sparse.Can India Beat the Heat? Renewed Focus on Heat-Proofing Is the Way AheadThe Human Cost the Data Does Not CaptureIn April 2025, researchers published a detailed mortality analysis of heatwave deaths across India. They found that among the six worst-affected districts in the country, measured by excess deaths during a five-day heatwave, Prayagraj appeared alongside Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Patna, Kanpur, and Lucknow. Each of these districts experiences more than 180 additional deaths during a single five-day extreme heat event. Among all states, UP accounts for over 8,000 deaths per heatwave, the highest of any state in India, followed by Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Gujarat.These numbers are excess deaths, meaning deaths over and above what would normally occur on non-heatwave days. Most of them never get counted in official records. India's official heat mortality data is deeply unreliable. The non-profit HeatWatch documented 733 heat deaths across India between March and June 2024. The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reported 360 for the same period, roughly half. The gap exists because most heat deaths in India are recorded as cardiac failure, organ failure, or dehydration, not heatstroke. Doctors in government hospitals rarely attribute deaths to heat directly, partly due to lack of training, partly due to the absence of mandatory reporting protocols. Beyond Delhi, Are India's Smaller Cities Prepared to Handle Rising Heat?Moreover, when government officials speak about heatwave preparedness, they tend to focus on who should stay indoors: children, the elderly, and pregnant women. What this framing avoids is a structural reality.A large share of India’s workforce—including many people in Prayagraj—cannot afford to stay indoors during extreme heat.The city's economy runs on daily-wage construction workers, cycle-rickshaw pullers, vegetable and fruit vendors in open-air mandis, auto-rickshaw drivers, and domestic workers who commute on foot or by bicycle. These are not people who have the choice to work from home or adjust their schedule to avoid peak heat hours.Nationally, the 2025 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change reported that extreme heat led to the loss of 247 billion potential labour hours in 2024, a 124 percent increase over 1990-1999 levels. This translates to approximately 419 hours per person per year.Agriculture accounted for 66 percent of these losses, and construction for 20 percent. The income loss across India reached an estimated $194 billion in 2024.Not Just Delhi: Data Reveals New Pollution Hotspots Emerging Across IndiaDelhi Gets a Plan, Prayagraj Gets a MemoThe contrast in how heat governance works in India's tier-1 versus tier-2 cities is stark and structural, not incidental. In April last year, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta formally launched Delhi's Heat Action Plan (HAP) 2025 that includes water coolers, shaded footpaths and bus stops, green roofs on public and private buildings, chilled water dispensers in slums and at railway stations, and dedicated hospital wards equipped to treat heat-related illnesses.In May the same year, Varanasi launched its own comprehensive HAP that includes hyperlocal vulnerability mapping, green cover addition at high-exposure pedestrian zones, low-cost cooling solutions, and cool roofs for the Varanasi Development Authority's low-income housing schemes.Prayagraj has no comparable city-level HAP. A district-level generic planning and city-specific HAPs are meaningfully different things. Abhiyant Tiwari, Health and Climate Resilience Lead at NRDC India and one of the architects of Varanasi's HAP, told The Quint that this gap is structural: In smaller cities, there is a rural-urban distinction when it comes to the administration, which often creates grey areas. For instance, Prayagraj Municipal Corporation handles urban wards, but jurisdiction over peri-urban areas, slums, and construction zones falls into contested territory between multiple departments.Although a lot of visible short-term actions are taking place that will gain political traction, long-term measures are lacking.The administrative response to Prayagraj's heat follows a consistent template: adjust school timings, extend summer breaks, and issue advisories.These are reactive measures, not structural solutions.The Down To Earth analysis on the Indo-Gangetic Plain's heat governance failures, published in April 2026, makes the point precisely: "The science of heat stress in the Indo-Gangetic Plain is settled. What remains dangerously unsettled is the governance."‘Overusing ACs is Unsustainable’: Experts Suggest Rethinking Climate PoliciesIndia Must Spend Big on Climate-Ready Cities: Experts Decode World Bank ReportWhat the Data DemandsThe case for Prayagraj to receive urgent, funded, city-specific heat governance is not difficult to make. The data is already there. The solutions are no mysteries. Ahmedabad created the world's first city-level HAP in 2013, and its framework has been replicated internationally. Cool roofs, Miyawaki mini-forests, cool shelters for outdoor workers, night shelters for the homeless, hospital preparedness protocols and district-specific heat thresholds are all established, low-cost interventions.This has been used as a template to create HAPs for other cities as well.Two specific shifts would move the needle for Prayagraj. First, the Central government must classify heatwaves as a notified disaster category under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, making state disaster response funds available for heat mitigation exactly as they are for floods. Second, the UP government should roll out Prayagraj's own city-level HAP before the 2027 pre-monsoon season, built on Varanasi's 2025 model and adapted for Prayagraj's specific geography, population density, and built environment.Until then, the city will continue to do what it has been doing for the past several summers—endure. The rickshaw pullers will cover their heads with wet cloth. The women in the old city's narrow lanes will pour water on their floors to bring the temperature down by a degree. The schoolchildren will come home at noon and try to sleep through afternoons where the shade still registers 40 degrees.And Prayagraj will keep appearing at the top of global heat rankings while remaining invisible in the national policy conversation about who the heat is killing.(Ankit Mishra is an ICSSR Fellow at Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj where his work is focused on environment, climate change, public policy and governance issues. This is an opinion piece and views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse nor is responsible for them.)Arabian Sea’s Heat Crisis: The Marine Threat People Can’t See But Must Face