India Heatwaves Shut Schools, Women Bear Career Cost
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- Schools across Delhi and roughly half of India's 28 states have been ordered closed from mid-May through end of June as temperatures exceed 41C, with school officials telling the Guardian that heat-driven closure days have risen sharply in recent years.
- Sakshi Katyal quit her job in February after her daughter attended school physically for barely any of the previous June-to-September stretch, leaving her family dependent on her husband's single income alongside a roughly ₹50,000 (£390) monthly mortgage.
- Zeenat Khatoon, a domestic helper in Delhi's Okhla neighbourhood earning about ₹8,000 a month with ₹5,000 going to rent, estimates her seven-year-old has been home for roughly seven of the past 12 months and pays a local woman ₹600 a month to supervise the children, cutting into grocery money.
- Noopur Goyal, one of fewer than 500 paediatric cardiologists serving India's 1.4 billion people, is a single mother whose hospital shifts collapse when her child's school closes on short notice — a bottleneck the piece links directly to the country's specialist-doctor shortage.
- Urvashi Prasad, former director at government thinktank Niti Aayog, said India's heat action plans "barely have a gender component" and that gender-disaggregated data on climate impacts is not collected.
- An anonymous labour economist warned that repeated closures are forcing women into precarious lower-paying work, reducing household income, and widening inequality unless schools, childcare and worker protections adapt to climate disruption.
- A senior Delhi higher education official, defending the closures, said many schools lack infrastructure for extreme heat and that "safety becomes the priority" — even as parents describe online classes as largely ineffective.
Why it matters: India has fewer than 500 paediatric cardiologists for a population of 1.4 billion, and a single mother like Noopur Goyal is one of them — so every heat-driven school closure is not just a household inconvenience but a direct drain on the country's healthcare and service-sector capacity, while informal workers like Zeenat Khatoon (₹8,000/month, ₹5,000 to rent) absorb the cost with no safety net.
