Climate Change Adaptation in India: Rural and Urban Strategies

India faces a dual climate challenge. Rising temperatures, erratic monsoons, and extreme weather events threaten both rural livelihoods and urban populations. While global conversations often focus on mitigation, India’s ground reality demands urgent adaptation. From parched villages in Rajasthan to sweltering cities like Ahmedabad, communities are already feeling the heat-literally. The good news? India has been experimenting with climate adaptation strategies across multiple fronts. Let’s examine how rural and urban areas are responding to this existential challenge.

Water management in rural areas: MGNREGA as a climate adaptation tool
Challenges in implementation
Heat-resistant crops: Breeding for a warming future
The extension services gap
Disaster-resistant housing: Building for extreme weather
Beyond basic shelter
Urban heat action plans: Progress and persistent gaps
Critical gaps in protection
The humidity challenge
The path forward

Water management in rural areas: MGNREGA as a climate adaptation tool

When we think of climate adaptation, large-scale infrastructure projects often come to mind. But India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has quietly emerged as one of the world’s largest climate adaptation programmes. Originally designed as a social safety net guaranteeing 100 days of employment to rural households, the scheme has evolved into a powerful vehicle for building climate resilience.

Over 70% of MGNREGA activities now focus on water security and conservation efforts. These include digging wells and farm ponds, constructing check dams, renovating old water bodies, building contour trenches, and undertaking watershed treatment. Such activities enhance water percolation, check surface runoff, improve groundwater levels, and provide communities with greater water security.

The programme mandates that 60% of its annual expenditure-approximately EUR 4.4 billion in 2018-19-goes toward natural resource management including water harvesting, conservation, afforestation, and land development. This focus on creating ecological assets serves a dual purpose: providing immediate employment and building long-term climate resilience.

Challenges in implementation

Despite its potential, questions remain about MGNREGA’s effectiveness as a climate adaptation tool. Research from IISc suggests that while these efforts are laudable, a bigger push from the government is needed. The challenge lies in measuring and quantifying the climate co-benefits of these interventions. Without proper monitoring frameworks, it becomes difficult to assess whether the water structures actually deliver the intended resilience benefits.

The Indo-German WASCA project has been working across five states to improve rural water resource management with respect to climate adaptation. The project demonstrates that when MGNREGA is combined with scientific planning approaches like Composite Water Resource Management, it can significantly enhance water security. Moving forward, the scheme needs better integration of climate information and adoption of location-specific interventions to maximize its adaptation potential.

Heat-resistant crops: Breeding for a warming future

India’s wheat production took a significant hit in 2022 when an early and prolonged heatwave struck during the critical grain-filling stage. Production dropped by approximately 10% compared to the previous year, forcing the government to ban wheat exports. This stark reminder of climate vulnerability has accelerated research into heat-tolerant crop varieties.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has responded by developing several climate-smart wheat varieties. HD-3385, developed by ICAR’s Indian Agricultural Research Institute, features high temperature stress tolerance, particularly during the terminal growth phase when crops are most vulnerable. This variety can be sown as early as October 20, allowing the crop to complete its grain-filling stage before extreme heat sets in.

Another variety, Pusa Ahilya (HI 1634), offers flexibility for farmers who need to sow wheat later-in December or January-after harvesting other crops like potatoes. It matures in approximately 100 days and has a yield potential of 70.6 quintals per hectare, making it suitable for the central Indian belt stretching from Rajasthan through Madhya Pradesh to parts of Uttar Pradesh.

The extension services gap

Developing climate-resilient varieties is only half the battle. Getting these seeds into farmers’ hands remains challenging. In the last decade, ICAR has released over 2,177 crop varieties targeting various climate stresses including soil salinity, submergence, drought, and heat tolerance. Yet adoption rates remain uneven.

Several factors constrain adoption: the time taken to develop and multiply seeds, unreliable yields under field conditions, cost of cultivation, and accessibility to farmers. Strengthened partnerships between ICAR and farmer producer organisations, women’s self-help groups, and seed banks could help bridge this gap. Some commercial wheat varieties that farmers currently use are nearly four decades old-clearly inadequate for adapting to increasingly extreme weather.

Disaster-resistant housing: Building for extreme weather

When Cyclone Fani ravaged Odisha’s coast in May 2019, winds reaching 175 km/h destroyed lakhs of houses. Yet some structures stood firm. These were houses designed by CSIR’s Central Building Research Institute (CSIR-CBRI), which had been providing technical guidance to Odisha since 2018. The cyclone became a powerful demonstration of how disaster-resistant design can save both lives and assets.

The Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) has emerged as the primary vehicle for providing climate-resilient housing to rural India. The scheme has sanctioned over 3.21 crore houses, with 2.67 crore already completed as of late 2024. Crucially, the programme has trained nearly 3 lakh rural masons in disaster-resilient construction techniques, creating a skilled workforce that can implement proper building standards.

Beyond basic shelter

PMAY-G promotes eco-friendly and disaster-resistant construction technologies using sustainable materials like fly ash bricks, rat-trap bond masonry, and filler slabs. The programme provides region-specific house designs through the ‘Pahal Compendium’, incorporating disaster-resilient features suited to local climate conditions and hazard profiles.

In Kerala, which lost nearly a million homes in consecutive floods in 2018 and 2019, architects like Gopalan Shankar are pioneering flood-resistant construction using local materials including treated bamboo, lime, and mud. These homes are designed not just to avoid inundation but to survive the impact of floodwaters when severe flooding does occur. The Kerala State Disaster Management Authority has been actively promoting awareness about such flood-resistant housing solutions.

However, challenges persist. Post-disaster rehabilitation often draws from existing development programmes like PMAY, which may not fully address the specific needs of disaster-affected communities, particularly landless labourers and marginalised groups who face compounded vulnerabilities.

Urban heat action plans: Progress and persistent gaps

Indian cities have been frontrunners in heat action planning since Ahmedabad launched South Asia’s first Heat Action Plan (HAP) in 2013. The Ahmedabad HAP has been credited with preventing many cases of heatstroke through measures like text message warnings when temperatures exceed 40°C, painting tin roofs white to reflect heat, and keeping public parks unlocked for shade-seeking workers.

Today, India has an estimated 100+ heat action plans at various administrative levels. A comprehensive study of ten city-level HAPs reveals an impressive range of interventions spanning informational, technological, nature-based, and behavioural solutions. These include seasonal heat advisories, public awareness campaigns, cooling shelters, adjusted school timings, and water distribution.

Critical gaps in protection

Despite this progress, significant gaps remain. An assessment of 37 HAPs found that only two explicitly conducted vulnerability assessments to identify and target those most at risk. Even more concerning, only three of 37 plans identified dedicated funding for their measures. This means expensive recommendations for infrastructure changes often remain on paper.

Nearly 80% of India’s urban informal workforce is exposed to heat stress, yet most heat action plans overlook these critical vulnerabilities. Research in Mumbai found that temperatures in some slum areas were up to 6°C higher than neighbouring middle-income neighbourhoods. Cities like Bengaluru have documented significant temperature variations linked directly to vegetation cover and urban planning quality.

The economic stakes are enormous. Between 2001 and 2020, India experienced an annual average loss of approximately 259 billion labour hours due to heat. Around three-quarters of the Indian labour force works in heat-exposed sectors producing about half of the country’s GDP. Yet current HAPs largely focus on short-term relief measures rather than transformational changes to urban planning and building codes.

The humidity challenge

Most heat action plans fail to account for humid heat-a critical oversight given India’s diverse climate zones. Coastal cities face particular risks when high humidity combines with elevated temperatures, creating dangerous wet-bulb conditions even at lower temperature thresholds. Current heatwave declarations based solely on temperature readings may miss these humidity-related risks entirely.

Promising innovations are emerging. Cities like Churu and Varanasi have launched HAPs featuring ward-level vulnerability assessments and GIS-based heat mapping, enabling more targeted interventions. The India Meteorological Department has also begun developing a heat index and heat hazard score that accounts for humidity, expected to improve heat warnings significantly.

The path forward

India’s climate adaptation journey reveals both remarkable innovation and persistent challenges. MGNREGA demonstrates how existing social protection programmes can deliver climate co-benefits when properly designed. ICAR’s heat-resistant crops show that agricultural science can respond to climate threats. PMAY-G proves that disaster-resilient housing is achievable at scale. And urban HAPs, despite their gaps, represent important steps toward protecting city dwellers from extreme heat.

The common thread connecting these efforts is the need for better targeting, stronger implementation, and more transformational thinking. Incremental measures-while necessary-cannot alone address the scale of climate risk facing India. What’s needed is integration: climate information flowing into programme design, vulnerability assessments guiding resource allocation, and long-term resilience goals driving short-term actions.

What do you think? How can India better integrate climate adaptation into its development programmes? Should urban heat action plans prioritise long-term infrastructure changes over immediate relief measures?

References

PDF 📄

Table of Contents

Water management in rural areas: MGNREGA as a climate adaptation tool 🔗

Challenges in implementation 🔗

Heat-resistant crops: Breeding for a warming future 🔗

The extension services gap 🔗

Disaster-resistant housing: Building for extreme weather 🔗

Beyond basic shelter 🔗

Urban heat action plans: Progress and persistent gaps 🔗

Critical gaps in protection 🔗

The humidity challenge 🔗

The path forward 🔗