But the bad news is India's heat action plans don't seem to be working very well. (It is unclear whether the authorities in Navi Mumbai had a heat action plan in place when a million people reportedly were allowed to gather under the open sky.) A new study of 37 heat action plans at the city, district and state levels by Aditya Valiathan Pillai and Tamanna Dalal of Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank, found a lot of shortcomings.
For one, most of the plans were not "built for local context and have an oversimplified view of the hazards". Only 10 of the 37 plans studied seem to establish locally defined temperature thresholds, although it was unclear whether they took factors like humidity into account while declaring a heatwave. "We recommend nuancing and localising the heat hazard definition by including climate projections," Mr Pillai told me. One way to do it is to have more automated weather stations at village levels, according to Prof Mavalankar.