Short Note: Sharp Decline in Heat-related Deaths in Recent Times

What were the key reasons for sharp decline in the number of heat-related deaths?

Unlike the past years, this year fortunately there has been a sharp decline in the rate of heat related deaths. All the credit for this goes to the various policies and proactive actions taken by the State government which caused heat-related deaths to have come down by almost 90% in the last two years — from 2,040 in 2015 to just 222 in the month of July, based upon the data compiled by National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

Considering the situation of year 2015, the authorities were compelled to think of precautionary measures. This year around nine state governments have prepared and implemented heat action plan which encompassed various simple and straightforward measures such as-

• maintaining adequate drinking water supply in public places
• Scheduling timings of office and school timings in such as to avoid peak heat hours during the day.
• Spreading awareness through campaigns regarding temperature alerts and instructions to avoid heat.
• In many of the states MGNREGA work was stopped during the peak hours.
• In some states, like Ahmedabad the construction projects were instructed to provide their workers a two-hour break.
• Many public parks, which were earlier to be open only in the evenings, were made opened for the daytime as well so as to enable people working in the open, to take rest under the trees and have access to the drinking water thus protecting them from the heatwaves.
• Oral rehydration solutions (ORS) were also distributed freely.
• Social media has been largely used as a platforms to spread awareness.
• The India Meteorological Department (IMD) issued heat wave bulletins from last year in order to issue warnings to citizens.
• In addition to the heat action plan at the state level, around 17 cities have developed their own specific plans emphasizing on public education on high temperatures and suggestions to resist excessive heat.

Hence all these strategies have helped to cope up with the heat waves and the best thing about all these measures is that neither it requires any kind of heavy investment nor it involves large number of labour but in fact is very cheap and easy to adopt.