Heat singes India, but noone knows how many

On a scorching May afternoon last year, a rag-picker in Delhi's Ghazipur area collapsed from heat exhaustion.

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"The family rushed him to the hospital," says Majida Begum, a sanitation worker who witnessed it. "But he was declared dead on arrival. They had no proof that he died due to heat, so they were not given any compensation."

His death was never officially counted, just one of the countless lives lost in India's intensifying heatwaves that go unrecorded and uncompensated.

An investigation by PTI reveals that disjointed, outdated reporting systems are obscuring the true toll, weakening both public awareness and policy action.

Accurate data on heat-related deaths helps identify who is most at risk.

Without it, the government cannot plan effectively, create targeted policies or take timely action to save lives.

But behind the missing numbers are real people, many poor and undocumented, whose deaths routinely slip through the cracks of India's incoherent reporting system.

Currently, at least three separate datasets attempt to monitor heatstroke or heat-related deaths. The two most-commonly cited in the media are maintained by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) under the health ministry and the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) under the home ministry.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) also carries figures on deaths caused by "heatwaves" in its annual reports, drawing data primarily from media coverage.

However, these three sources report widely-varying numbers.