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Hi [First Name],
Here’s a number that should stop you: 57% of Indian women aged 15–49 are anaemic. That’s not a maternal health footnote. Per NFHS-5 data, it’s a baseline condition that sharply cuts a woman’s tolerance to heat stress, dehydration, and physical exertion, right as climate change is increasing all three.
That’s the starting point of my latest piece on Faultlines, “Bodies for Growth: From Fields to Offices, How Climate Change Is Forcing Indian Women to Pay With Their Health.”
The argument is simple, and I think it’s one India’s climate policy keeps missing: we’ve built genuinely sophisticated systems for detecting acute climate risk, heatwaves, floods, and disasters, with real successes to show for it. But climate harm doesn’t only arrive as a crisis. Most of it arrives quietly, accumulates in bodies rather than institutions, and never trips a policy alarm because it doesn’t look like a system failure. It looks like a woman deciding, rationally, to skip an antenatal visit because the heat makes the trip too costly.
In the piece, I follow this through three very different women:
A rural woman in a water-stressed state, already spending nearly twice as much time as men just collecting water, is now doing that labour in temperatures regularly exceeding 45°C.
An urban informal worker in a heat-island city like Delhi or Chennai, working long hours outdoors, then going home to a tin-roofed room where even the nights don’t cool down enough to recover.
A corporate professional in Bengaluru or Gurugram, technically protected by air conditioning, but not by a work culture that expects her to manage pregnancy discreetly and treats climate-driven exhaustion as a personal balance problem rather than an occupational one.
Three completely different lives. Same underlying pattern: women absorbing climate stress privately so the systems around them, households, markets, employers, don’t have to.
The full piece goes deep into the data (NFHS-5, IMD, IHDS, ORF, CSIS) and into where India’s actual policy architecture, NAPCC, Heat Action Plans, ABDM, PM-JAY, is and isn’t built to see this. It’s a longer read, but I think it’s one of the more important things I’ve written this year.
As always, if you read it and think I’ve missed something or gotten something wrong, reply to this email. I mean that.
Until next time, Faultlines
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