Shabbir Alam works at construction sites in Haryana, though his home is in Ludhiana. Last month, ₹1,000 appeared in his account. His contractor had enrolled him and some colleagues in a scheme under which, if temperatures crossed a certain threshold, money would be paid. “I earn ₹800- ₹1,000 a day from my work…Some of us got ₹1,000 last month, so it was helpful,” he told The Hindu in a phone conversation.

Also read | Mapping the legislative vacuum in India’s heat crisis

Hariom, who drives a leased taxi in the Delhi-NCR region, received ₹2000 over two months. “I’m happy that I got this…We anyway have a company rule that we can avoid driving on very hot days from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., but extra money is always welcome,” he told The Hindu. 

Mr. Alam and Mr. Hariom are among 3,925 informal workers enrolled this year across Delhi-NCR — Noida, Delhi, Gurugram, Ghaziabad and Faridabad — under a “parametric” heat-insurance product run by the non-profit Jan Sahas, with Go Digit General Insurance and the CSR arm of Godrej Properties among its partners.

Circuiting the need for policyholders to pay premiums or submit claims, parametric insurance depends on a pre-set trigger, calculated by insurers from a historical dataset on temperature, humidity, rainfall and air-quality over a region. If a day’s weather index crosses a predetermined threshold, or an index, it would trigger a payout to the worker’s account, no questions asked. Last year, of roughly 6,000 workers enrolled, 722 in Noida received ₹1,000 when that city’s trigger was activated.

According to the IMD’s May weather bulletin, only on a single day, maximum temperatures in Delhi were at least 5°C ‘above normal’—one of the qualifying criteria to be a ‘heatwave’ day. The IMD has forecast ‘above-normal’ heatwave conditions over much of India in 2026, and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) expects El Niño, which tends to weaken the monsoon and intensify heat, to develop after July, following a summer that pushed temperatures past 47°C in some places. 

“Insurance companies usually set heat-index payout thresholds by looking at past weather and loss data to find the point where extreme heat starts causing real problems [using correlation between heat wave, excess rainfall or AQI with health], such as reduced productivity or health risks,” Shailesh Acharya, Director, Jan Sahas, said in an email response through a spokesperson.

Several such schemes now exist. The Self-Employed Women’s Association’s (SEWA) programme, the largest of its kind, grew from 21,000 women in Gujarat in 2023 to about 2.25 lakh women across seven States by 2025, paying out a few hundred rupees whenever temperatures exceed 40°C, according to a study by the Council for Inclusive Capitalism. 

No State government yet runs a heat-insurance scheme for workers—Nagaland’s is the lone government parametric policy that insures residents against excess rainfall. Almost everywhere, premiums are paid by philanthropic organisations rather than workers themselves.

Whether the money alters behaviour is a more difficult question. In a randomised trial involving 276 gig delivery workers in Delhi and Gurugram, published on the Social Science Repository Network, economists Chen, Y.M.A Hossain and S. Sekhri found that a ₹200 payment at the start of a heatwave let workers shift their schedules to cooler parts of the day and rest. Those who received only heat warnings worked 0.8 fewer days and reported far more headaches and fatigue.

Absence of cash

Yet even workers who benefited from the scheme would not pay for such cover in advance and are held back, the authors said, not by ignorance of the danger, but by the absence of cash precisely when the heatwave forces the choice between health and income.

“Our goal is to drive greater accountability among industry and government stakeholders for safeguarding workers against climate-related challenges, including extreme heat and air pollution, which can result in adverse health outcomes and loss of income,” said Mr. Acharya, adding, “Ultimately, workers should have the option of deciding whether they want to continue working under extreme climatic conditions or take time off until conditions become safer and more tolerable, without being forced to choose between their health and their income.”

Under the Jan Sahas’-led scheme too, workers get payouts only after temperatures actually cross a threshold, and they don’t get a specific forecast on whether temperatures are likely to cross a threshold on a particular day.

Jatin Singh, founder of weather forecasting firm Skymet, who has provided data for parametric schemes to cover agricultural losses, said such programmes could work only under government or philanthropic largesse. “Parametric insurance does not have its own legs,” Mr. Singh told The Hindu. It survives as a retail business only where the law compels it, as with motor insurance, or where a real risk pool exists, as in life and health insurance. For example, crop parametric cover is run by government premium subsidies worth about ₹30,000 crore a year.

“Without somebody else paying the premium, the model doesn’t work,” he said.