India is expected in the coming weeks to firm up arrangements under which the Centre and State governments will jointly finance heatwave mitigation, a senior official at the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has indicated. This comes on the back of a 2024 decision allowing mitigation funds to be used against extreme heat and acts on a fresh recommendation from the 16th Finance Commission to formally notify heatwaves as a disaster. Mitigation means addressing the sources of extreme heat or investing in cooling solutions, as opposed to the current approach of dealing with the after-effects of heatwaves on health.

“Both the States and the Centre need to come together and spend,” Krishna Vatsa, member and head of the NDMA, said at the India Heat Summit here, outlining the agency’s approach to funding heat action plans. “We have two tiers of funds: the State Disaster Response Fund and the State Disaster Mitigation Fund at the state level, and the National Disaster Mitigation Fund and National Disaster Response Fund at the national level. So the resources need to be pooled.”

Mr. Vatsa said the NDMA was recommending “seed funding from the centre and seed funding from the state,” supplemented by contributions from local governments, corporate social responsibility allocations, and civil society organisations. “It has to be a generally locally led initiative,” he said, adding that an indicative minimum allocation per district, based on population, was being worked out, with cities to be considered separately.

He indicated movement was imminent. “All this, I think, should be very feasible within a very short period of time. So we are hopeful,” he said, noting that the NDMA was “very keen that heat wave plans are financed financially as well.”

The shift follows years in which heatwave responses sat outside the main disaster financing architecture. Until 2015, heatwave management was largely a State subject, with Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Kerala and Karnataka treating it as a locally notified disaster. The 15th Finance Commission, reporting in 2020, declined to expand the national list of notified disasters to include extreme heat. The 16th Finance Commission reversed that position in November 2025, recommending the inclusion of both heatwaves and lightning “given their scale and the fact that they often exceed the coping capacity of affected communities,” and proposing a ₹2 lakh crore corpus for state-level response and mitigation funds over 2026-27 to 2030-31. The Union government accepted several of the Commission’s recommendations on February 1, 2026, but has not yet acted on the expanded disaster list.

A 2024 government decision had already permitted heatwave mitigation to be financed through the National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds. “That actually opened the gate for the mitigation fund to be spent on heat wave mitigation,” Mr. Vatsa said.

Heat action plans now exist in 23 States, 270 districts and 64 cities, with around 100 more under preparation, taking the total to 304, he said. He acknowledged uneven quality. “Some heat action plans that are supported by experts and practitioners are good. Some of the heat action plans may not be that good, or they may just be, you know, imitations of other heat action plans,” he said, adding that the focus was shifting from immediate relief measures to longer-term mitigation.

Operationalising joint funding will raise questions of quantum and accountability, Mr. Vatsa said. “How many water coolers should I buy? How many cooling shades should I erect? These are some of the difficult issues.” Indicative costs, he said, varied significantly between states and cities. There was also a risk, he cautioned, that heat action plans could degenerate into procurement exercises. “We need to guard against all those things.”