A man cools down as an Agra Municipal Corporation tanker sprays water to beat the heat near Agra Fort in Agra on April 24, 2026. | Photo credit: PTI
India is expected to finalize arrangements in the coming weeks under which the Center and state governments will jointly fund heat wave mitigation, a senior National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) official said. This comes on the back of the 2024 decision to allow funds to be used for mitigation against extreme heat, and follows a new recommendation by the 16th Finance Commission to formally declare heat waves as a disaster. Mitigation means addressing the sources of extreme heat or investing in cooling solutions, as opposed to the current approach to addressing the health consequences of heat waves.
“States and the Center have to come together and spend,” said Krishna Vatsa, member and head of NDMA at the India Heat Summit, outlining the agency’s approach to funding heat action plans. “We have two levels of funds: the State Disaster Response Fund and the State Disaster Mitigation Fund at the state level and the National Disaster Mitigation Fund and the National Disaster Response Fund at the national level. So the resources need to be pooled.”
Mr Vatsa said the NDMA recommends “seed funding from the Center and seed funding from the state”, supplemented by contributions from local governments, CSR allocations and civil society organisations. “It has to be a generally locally-led initiative,” he said, adding that an indicative minimum allocation per county based on population is being prepared, with cities to be assessed separately.
He indicated that a move was coming. “I think all of this should be very doable in a very short period of time. So we’re hopeful,” he said, adding that the NDMA “is very happy that the heat wave plans are funded as well.”
The shift follows years when heatwave responses were outside the mainstream disaster funding architecture. Until 2015, heat wave management was largely a state matter, with Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Kerala and Karnataka treating it as a locally notified disaster. The 15th Finance Commission, which reported in 2020, refused to expand the national list of notified disasters to include extreme heat. The 16th Finance Commission changed this position in November 2025, recommending the inclusion of both heat waves and lightning “in view of their magnitude and the fact that they often exceed the capacity of affected communities,” and proposed a corpus of ₹2,000,000 for state funds for response and mitigation from 2026-27 to 2030-13. The Union Government accepted several recommendations of the Commission on February 1, 2026, but has not yet acted on the expanded list of disasters.
Government Decision 2024 has already authorized funding for heatwave mitigation through the National and State Disaster Mitigation Fund. “This actually opened the door for a mitigation fund to be spent on mitigating the heat wave,” Mr Vatsa said.
Heat action plans now exist in 23 states, 270 counties and 64 cities, with about 100 more in the pipeline, bringing the total to 304, he said. He admitted the unequaled quality. “Some heat action plans that are supported by experts and practitioners are good. Some heat action plans may not be so good, or they may be, you know, imitations of other heat action plans,” he said, noting that the focus has shifted from immediate relief measures to longer-term mitigation.
Operationalizing joint funding will raise questions of quantity and accountability, Mr Vatsa said. “How many water coolers should I buy? How many cooling shades should I build? Those are some of the difficult problems.” Estimated costs varied significantly between states and cities, he said. He also warned that there was a risk that heat action plans could derail in a buying exercise. “We have to protect ourselves from all these things.
Published – 13 May 2026 23:00 IST
