Experts Demand Reliable Data on Deaths, ET HealthWorld

New Delhi: There is no reliable data on heatstroke and heat deaths as data-reporting systems are not uniformly strong across the country, experts said on Tuesday.

Talking about the impact of extreme heat at the India Heat Summit 2025, organised by research group Climate Trends, Health Ministry Advisor Soumya Swaminathan said deaths are just the tip of the iceberg.

“We do not fully count all the deaths attributable to climate hazards or to heat as reporting systems are not uniformly strong across the country,” she said.

There is a need to strengthen death-reporting systems “because that is the best source for the government, for the policymakers to know … what people die of is what should inform your policy and that keeps changing from time to time”, Swaminathan said.

She had earlier told PTI in an interview that India is “most likely” undercounting heat-related deaths due to a lack of robust data.

The former chief of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said data has been sitting in silos and called for the establishment of an environmental health hub, where the ministries of health, environment and earth sciences come together, share data and translate information into action.

Swaminathan, however, warned against focusing only on deaths.

“It is not just the mortality we need to be fixated on…. (We need to ascertain) the impact on health and productivity. Ultimately, health determines your productivity and impact on the GDP,” she said.

Chandni Singh, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, said there are challenges in how India records heat deaths and there is no good dataset to refer to.

“Currently, there is no nationally representative data on heatstroke and heat-related deaths. One can, however, draw inferences from the existing datasets,” she said.

The health ministry’s National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has been collecting and reporting heatstroke and heat-death data under the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) since 2015.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) also maintains data related to heat deaths, sourced from media reports.

Apart from this, Union Earth Sciences Minister Jitendra Singh has cited the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) data on heat deaths in parliamentary replies.

All three datasets report different figures for heat-related deaths.

For example, according to the NCDC, a total of 3,775 heat-related deaths were reported between 2015 and 2019. During the same period, the NCRB recorded 6,537 heat-related deaths.

Swaminathan also said that though the number of heat action plans is increasing, these are developed by a group of experts sitting together, there is very little community consultation that has gone into these and there is very little ground truthing and very little feedback collected.

Krishna Vatsa, member, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), said the country lacks a “very well established academic or technical centre…. A group of people who could help districts prepare heat action plans”.

“We do not have one designated, proper centre of excellence for dissemination of all the knowledge and expertise,” he said.

Vatsa said if it were left just to officers to write heat action plans, it would not be very successful and more handholding and technical training were needed.