Outside, the temperature has passed 41C (105.8F). Inside Sakshi Katyal’s city apartment, the air conditioner is blasting but it does little to relieve the stress of balancing housework and helping her five-year-old log in on a laptop to online classes. Her daughter’s school closed in May and Katyal is not clear when it will reopen. Probably not till the autumn.

Schools across Delhi and in about half of India’s 28 states, have been ordered to close from mid-May until the end of June, when in many places the summer break starts. There is no official record of closures in past years but the Guardian has spoken to school officials who say the number of days schools are shut for because of the heat has risen sharply. The impact on families, especially on working women, has been huge.

Katyal and her husband moved to Noida, part of greater Delhi’s National Capital Region, in December 2025, to be closer to their daughter’s school, and to make balancing childcare and work easier.

“Till last year, everything was great,” Katyal says. “I had a great job and last year we even bought our apartment. The apartment meant more than property. It meant stability.

“Then one notification changed everything: the notification that my daughter’s school was shutting.”

Katyal had already left her higher-paying corporate role for a less demanding job to better manage childcare during repeated school disruptions. “Last year felt like a battle,” she says. Between June and September her daughter barely attended school physically at all.

In February, exhausted after months of juggling work and childcare, Katyal quit her job.

“My daughter would ask for food or attention while my manager was demanding reports,” she says. “Sometimes I would hand her a phone or switch on the TV just to keep her occupied.”

The family now survives on a single income while continuing to pay a monthly mortgage of about ₹50,000 (£390). “I already knew schools were likely to shut again because of the heat,” says Kaytal. “That’s when I realised I could not do this any more. Earlier, I managed everything on my own. Now, I have to ask my husband for money even for groceries or my daughter’s school fees.”

India is facing increasingly intense spells of extreme heat, with this year’s heatwaves beginning as early as April. Hundreds of thousands of parents in India are struggling with managing jobs and children as lives are disrupted by prolonged school closures linked to the high temperatures. And as childcare disproportionately falls to women, it is women who are bearing the brunt.

Nearly 15km away from Noida is Nai Basti, a densely packed neighbourhood in Okhla, south-east Delhi. Here 24-year-old Zeenat Khatoon lives in a one-room rented home with her two children. The entrance opens on to a narrow unfinished staircase, with clothes hanging from ropes tied along the walls. She cooks here, in the staircase outside her room, in 40C heat, on a small stove. “I don’t have a kitchen,” she says. Khatoon works as a domestic helper in two homes in Shaheen Bagh, earning about ₹8,000 a month. About ₹5,000 goes towards rent. Her seven-year-old daughter attends a nearby government school, and she hopes to enrol her son next year. But with schools closed, her daughter is at home.

Khatoon estimates that her daughter has been at home for roughly seven months in the past 12, with closures caused by heatwaves and pollution. “When classes go online because of heatwaves, I don’t even know if my daughter is studying properly,” she says. “I can’t stay home to monitor her. If I stop going to work, who will pay the rent, school fees and food expenses?”

She pays a local woman ₹600 a month to supervise the children and help monitor their studies during school closures. “To arrange that money, I cut down on groceries,” she says. “But I don’t want my children to spend their lives washing dishes or mopping floors like me.”

Across the city, another mother, 42-year-old Surbi Devi, who lives in a room in Saket with her disabled child, says she lost nearly a month of wages during last summer’s school closures. “What kind of policy is this?” she asks.

A labour economist, speaking on condition of anonymity because of workplace restrictions, says the disruptions are creating cascading economic consequences.

“The majority of women are being forced either to stay at home or move into precarious, lower-paying work because they have to care for children during repeated school closures,” the economist says. “This reduces household income and pushes some families closer to poverty.”

He says employers are losing productivity when workers miss shifts or leave jobs, especially in healthcare and service sectors where staffing shortages already exist. Children lose months of education, affecting future potential. “Unless schools, childcare systems and worker protections adapt to climate disruption, this will widen inequality and slow economic growth,” he says.

Urvashi Prasad, a former director at government thinktank Niti Aayog, who has worked on public health, says India’s climate response rarely accounts for women’s unequal burden. “Most heat action plans in India barely have a gender component,” she says. “We don’t analyse gender-disaggregated data to understand how climate policies affect women differently.”

She says informal workers such as domestic helpers, street vendors and agricultural labourers, and their children, are hit hard. “If we already know heatwaves and pollution will come every year, why aren’t we planning ahead instead of shutting schools at the last moment?”

A senior official in Delhi’s higher education department, who does not wish to be named, defends the closures as emergency measures. “Sometimes governments are simply trying to save lives,” he says. “Many schools lack the infrastructure to deal with extreme heat. We know online classes are not fully effective, but safety becomes the priority.”

The strain is visible in all sectors. India has fewer than 500 paediatric cardiologists for a population of 1.4 billion. Noopur Goyal, 44, a single mother in Noida, is one. After 16 years of medical training, she works with children with life-threatening heart conditions. But her schedule can collapse because of a school notification.

“How do I work properly on shifts?” she asks. “Suppose I have an important case tomorrow and my child’s school closes. What do I do?” As a single mother, every disruption falls on her shoulders. “My child is barely going to school for six months of the year,” she says. “You rarely hear a man saying, ‘I can’t go to work because my maid hasn’t come.’ But women have to say that all the time.”

In a country already struggling with shortages of specialised doctors, climate breakdown is beginning to reshape careers, households and futures – one closed school, one missed shift and one impossible morning at a time.