The coverage of the Noida protests of April 2026 explored the impact of stagnant wages, rising costs and workers pushed past a breaking point. All of that is true. But as climate researchers tracking the intersection of heat, labour, and policy in India, we found ourselves looking at the same events through a different lens – the lens of heat.
The protests broke out in the second week of April, when Noida temperatures were between 36 and 39 degrees Celsius, with forecasts of 42 degrees the following week. Humidity between 60 and 70% pushed apparent temperatures well beyond dry-bulb readings. The April 2026 temperatures in Noida were not a seasonal anomaly but part of a documented trend. A March 2026 analysis by Climate Trends, a research-based consulting and capacity building organisation, showed how climate change is overriding the cooling effects of La Niña and compressing the window of thermal relief between winter and summer.
The contractual migrant workers employed in garment and hosiery manufacturing, who are at the centre of the protests, are the population that research has most consistently identified as bearing the highest occupational heat burden in India.
A 2016 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which profiled heat stress across 442 workers in 18 Indian workplaces, found that 82% were exposed to heat levels exceeding internationally recommended Wet Bulb Globe Temperature thresholds during the hotter season. Nearly 80% were from the unorganised sector.
Another 2025 study in Springer Nature found dehydration to be the single strongest predictor of productivity loss among informal workers, with an odds ratio of 11.62. Workers who were not acclimatised faced dramatically higher heat strain risk, directly relevant to seasonal migrants newly arrived from comparatively cooler districts in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
A study on Chennai workplaces, using the internationally validated Predicted Heat Strain model, identified the critical risk factor: externally paced work. When production is governed by quotas, machinery speed, or piece-rate wages, workers push beyond their safe physiological limit. The study found that female workers in these conditions reached dangerous core body temperatures within 64 minutes of starting a shift. Garment sewing and hosiery production are both externally paced industries.
The Journal of Political Economy study on Indian manufacturing, using microdata from garment sewing and cloth weaving facilities in the NCR, found that factory output falls approximately 2% for every degree Celsius rise in annual temperature. Most units had no climate control because value-added per worker was judged too low to justify the cost.
At the individual level, a 2024 study in Environmental Research Letters tracked nearly 400 informal workers in Delhi through the summer of 2019. Every one-degree Celsius rise in wet-bulb temperature was associated with a 19% fall in net earnings. During heatwaves, net earnings fell 40%. Research also establishes that soaring mercury also fuels anger, irritability and violence, a trait often observed in both protestors and law enforcers.
There is also a longer-term health trajectory, which the wages frame misses entirely. Research in the Indian Journal of Nephrology has identified heat-induced chronic kidney disease as an emerging occupational health crisis, driven by repeated cycles of heat exposure and inadequate rehydration. Workers denied adequate breaks and hydration during a twelve-hour shift are not just losing productivity. Over months and years, they may be losing organ function.
The ILO has estimated that heat stress could result in a 4.5% reduction in India’s GDP and the loss of 35 million full-time jobs by 2030. These projections assume a policy environment attempting to address the problem. But India’s Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code moved in the opposite direction, and a weak monsoon forecast arrived to confirm that the climate pressure underpinning all of it is not easing.
The workers’ demand for shorter hours and break rights was framed as an economic grievance. However, in occupational health terms, it is the minimum adaptive mechanism needed to survive a twelve-hour shift at these temperatures. This connection was largely missed.
We, as climate researchers, believe that what happened in Noida on April 13, when 40,000 to 45,000 garment and hosiery workers flooded the industrial belt of Phase 2, did not emerge from a single bad month.
The rising heat stress added to the burden of stagnating wages on an invisible workforce that is increasingly finding itself battling new challenges rooted in a shifting policy landscape.
India’s Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code came into force in November 2025. It expanded permissible working hours to 12 hours a day. That shift length was a central grievance for Noida workers.
The same law scrapped the mandatory thirty-degree wet-bulb temperature standard that had existed under the old Factories Act. What replaced it was government discretion. This means that the Centre may notify heat safety standards, however, but it is not required to. This was formally documented in the Amazon India Workers’ Union’s submission to the Ministry of Labour in March 2026.
Workers received longer permissible shifts, in hotter conditions, with weaker legal protection, and this took effect just months before April temperatures in Noida climbed towards 42 degrees.
The policy gap extends beyond the labour code. A CEEW review of 15 state-level Heat Action Plans found only two had conducted heat risk assessments at the occupational group level. The Uttar Pradesh Heat Action Plan 2024, while innovative in setting district-specific alert thresholds, contains no industrial workplace provisions. The 16th Finance Commission recommended in February 2026 that heatwaves be added to the national notified disaster list – a change that would unlock access to the full State Disaster Response Fund for heatwave relief for the first time. That recommendation has not been enacted.
An analysis of Delhi’s land surface and ambient temperature data found that the city’s nighttime cooling capacity in pre-monsoon months has declined by 42% since 2001. The structural driver behind this trend is now well-documented. A joint analysis by Climate Trends and Climate Central, a Princeton based data analytics non-profit, found that climate change added approximately 50 to 80 nights each year above the 25°C threshold in cities across major Indian states between 2018 and 2023. In Uttar Pradesh, home of most migrant workers in Noida, cities including Varanasi and Lakhimpur Kheri recorded their highest-ever minimum temperatures during this period. A worker returning to a shared room in Noida after a twelve-hour shift is not simply dealing with a hot night. Climate change has stolen the cooling that sleep depends on. A decade ago, nights offered recovery. Now they don’t.
The day-to-night temperature differential was nearly 15 degrees in 2001 to 2010. By 2025, it had dropped to 8.6 degrees. A 2026 systematic review in the Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found nighttime temperatures above 25 degrees are strongly associated with disrupted sleep and non-restorative rest among workers in poorly ventilated housing. Workers arriving at a 12-hour shift already carrying heat load from the previous night are not starting from a physiological baseline. No Indian heat action plan addresses the home-recovery dimension of occupational heat exposure.
Climate researchers saw the protests not ‘just’ as a wages story. It was, what economists call, a polycrisis. Adam Tooze, who popularised the term, defines it as: not multiple crises coinciding, but a situation where the whole is more dangerous than the sum of the parts.
India’s heat governance has been built around the assumption that crises arrive one at a time.
The Noida protests in April 2026 is evidence that they do not.
Aarti Khosla is Founder and Director of Climate Trends and she has over 20 years of experience working on various communication efforts across the environment sector, and FMCGs.
Gunjan Jain is Assistant Director, Climate Trends and leads their communications for air quality and climate impacts.
