Almost seven in 10 children in India lost school days or routine activities last summer to heat-related distress, and 76 percent said the heat wrecked their concentration, according to a new report by CRY — Child Rights and You.
The rapid survey, “Feeling the Heat: Children’s Voices on Heat, Well-Being and Learning in India,” polled more than 3,000 children ages 10 to 17 across 27 states and Union Territories. It found that rising temperatures are cutting into school attendance, learning, health and well-being nationwide.
The findings follow a summer of repeated heatwaves. Temperatures crossed 45 degrees Celsius across northern and central India, and at one point nearly all of the world’s hottest cities were located in the country. Schools across the country revised timings, cut outdoor activities, or shut down entirely.
Behind those numbers are ordinary school days that became unbearable. A 17-year-old boy in Assam described his shirt sticking to his chair and sweat dripping onto his desk while a ceiling fan barely moved the air. “It was hard to concentrate,” he said. “I felt tired, thirsty, and distracted all day.”
An 11-year-old girl in Telangana said she felt close to fainting in class, her clothes too heavy to bear, and still felt sick by the time she got home. A 17-year-old boy in Madhya Pradesh told volunteers his school has no reliable water service, leaving him especially exposed to the heat on his walk to class each day.
Where It Hit Hardest
Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal fared worst. In Andhra Pradesh, 88 percent of surveyed children missed school or routine activities to heat. In West Bengal, it was 72 percent, driven partly by humidity that pushed the heat index near 51 degrees Celsius even as thermometers read a more modest 34 to 38 degrees.
West Bengal’s school education minister, Dipak Barman, called it “a major problem” in this age of climate change. His fix, for now: fans in all 81,000 state-run schools.
Dehydration was worst in Uttar Pradesh, where 75 percent of children reported it, according to Anupama Muhuri, CRY’s national lead for volunteer engagement. Andhra Pradesh led on tiredness and dizziness; Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal led on sleeplessness.
Poorer children bore the worst of it. Among children of daily-wage and manual-labor families, 71 percent reported severe heat distress, compared with 46 percent of their better-off classmates.
Girls reported more heat-related health effects than boys across nearly every measure — headaches, dehydration, and studying becoming harder. The gap showed up less in checkboxes than in girls’ own written accounts, where chores, caregiving and water-fetching came up again and again.
A pediatrician in Kolkata, Dr. Apurba Ghosh of the Institute of Child Health, said fatigue is now the clearest warning sign doctors see. “Children are suffering much more than before due to exposure to this acute and sweltering heat,” he said.
Not Alone in This
India’s children are not alone. A UNICEF analysis found that heatwaves and other climate disasters disrupted schooling for 242 million students in 85 countries in 2024, with heat alone responsible for 171 million of those disruptions — the single biggest cause. South Asia, including India, was the hardest-hit region on Earth.
Separate research from American economists, tracking 10 million students, found that each degree Fahrenheit of extra heat during a school year cuts learning by roughly 1 percent in schools without air conditioning — a toll that lands hardest on low-income students, mirroring what CRY found in Indian classrooms.
What Children Are Asking For
Their requests were not complicated. Better school facilities — fans, water, ventilation — topped the list, followed by earlier or shortened school hours and cooler community spaces to escape to. “Please understand that we don’t become lazy because of the heat,” one child wrote. “We become tired.”
An 11-year-old girl in Delhi described a day when her father collapsed from heat and couldn’t work. She stayed home to cool his fever with a wet cloth through a five-hour power cut. By evening, she said, “it felt like my skin was burning.”
That is the real finding buried in the survey’s percentages: heat does not just close schools. It reroutes childhoods — into sickrooms, water lines, and households straining under lost wages.
CRY’s chief executive, Puja Marwaha, said the point of the survey was to let that data breathe. “While temperature records tell us how hot it is becoming, children tell us how that heat impacts their lives,” she said, urging officials to build the findings into heat action plans.
CRY calls this a rapid, volunteer-led listening exercise, not a scientific census — the sample skews toward states with more volunteers, and it wasn’t built for causal claims. But three thousand children saying the same thing, city after city, is its own kind of data.
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