“Hellish.” That’s how garment workers like Aruvi, from the southern Indian city of Dindigul, describe working conditions during the country’s heat season from April to May, when temperatures easily climb past 38 degrees Celsius, or just above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Most fans in her factory are broken, said the 39-year-old, using a pseudonym to speak freely without fear of reprisal. And the few that still work can’t be switched on, since they risk blowing away the labels she fuses onto clothing. The indoor swelter, along with the fatigue, mental haze and bodily aches that come with it, is unavoidable—part of a daily reality she has little choice but to endure to meet aggressive productivity quotas that compensate for razor-thin margins.
Any complaints to management are immediately shot down.
“They always say, ‘Look at the farmers working in the sun. Your life is better. You’re not an agricultural or construction worker—be grateful,’” said Aruvi, her family’s sole breadwinner. “But is our life really better? We also suffer. We’re working under pressure, with no fans and constant targets. The buying cost is fixed, and no buyer pays for our comfort. Neither the supplier nor the brands realize—we are boiling for their profits.”
Her experience is part of a broader study by HeatWatch, a New Delhi research nonprofit, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, a Mumbai-based university. By surveying 115 garment workers in Tamil Nadu and Delhi’s National Capital Region, then conducting nearly 50 follow-up interviews, researchers uncovered a growing crisis: heat stress in India is not only an occupational health concern but also a highly gendered human rights issue.
The findings paint a stark picture as climate-related heatwaves continue to intensify across India. Among the workers polled, 36.5 percent said water, when available, often runs out or is unclean. Another 78.3 percent said getting bathroom permission was difficult, prompting them to drink less even when parched. The same percentage reported poor ventilation at workstations that made the air so hot and stuffy it felt like working in a furnace. Nearly 69 percent said the heat affected their work; 87 percent recounted heat-related ailments such as headaches, dizziness, weakness and muscle cramps within the past year; and 87.8 percent said they felt utterly drained by day’s end during the summer months.
One of the main issues, said S. Rahul, assistant professor at TISS’s School of Management and Labour Studies, is the preponderance of infrastructure gaps that don’t account for soaring temperatures, especially in legacy hubs that rely on older mechanical setups without centralized climate controls. Of 15 factories and textile units in Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, Faridabad and Noida in Delhi-NCR, and Surat in Gujarat, 11 had roofs made of metal or asbestos and seven lacked devices for measuring temperature or humidity.
Some of the problems stem from policies that prioritize product integrity over human comfort—say, banning water bottles nearby because a careless worker could spill one and ruin the fabric. But equally culpable is the underpaid nature of the work, which is often piece-rate, Rahul said.
“If your wage is so precarious, then you would push yourself to work more, work faster and take fewer breaks,” he said. “If you’re earning less, you won’t be able to access healthcare outside the factory. You won’t invest in cooling devices at home or take a day off when you need one. There’s a larger structural issue here.”
The health benefit workers receive—what’s called the Employees’ State Insurance Scheme—offers little help. ESIS hospitals don’t cover the heat-related diseases that workers now regularly face, leaving them without remedy.
“The ESI scheme will cover only occupational hazards that are defined within the act,” Rahul said. “So if you have a cut on your finger, a disability or certain kinds of allergies, those are things that are considered eligible for health benefits. Heat and conditions associated with it are not addressed as medical emergencies. They don’t fall under occupational safety.”
Heat stress is also a matter of gender equity. More than 70 percent of the 45 million workers directly employed by India’s garment and textile industry—its second-largest employer after agriculture—are women.
Those numbers, too, are revealing. Nearly 97 percent of female respondents reported burning sensations during urination, while 45 percent described amber to brown urine—a sign of dehydration and possible kidney strain. Almost 94 percent reported thick white discharge, signaling vaginal yeast infections common in hot, humid conditions. More than 92 percent experienced menstrual disruptions or increased pain, likely due to the draconian pressures typical of apparel production’s low-cost, high-volume business model.
“A lot of what we observed was how informally gender shapes differentiated experiences, because male workers were allowed to go out of the production unit for a refreshment and walk around during break hours,” said Vasundhara Jhobta, a project associate at HeatWatch. “Women are restricted in that aspect. Many of the smaller units didn’t have separate toilets for women, even with larger female workforces, and women consequently avoided using them altogether.”
Revising schedules around peak heat periods wouldn’t help most women, either, because of childcare, eldercare and other household duties outside primary work hours.
Creating accountability
HeatWatch and TISS deliberately don’t name any suppliers or the brands they supply to protect factories—and by extension, their workers—from potential retaliation. Rahul doesn’t expect manufacturers to bear all the responsibility of managing heat if buyers are “eating up” a major share of their profits. Heat stress, he said, should be a shared obligation requiring North American and European brands to invest in their suppliers.
According to a 2025 analysis by the Business and Human Rights Center, few brands recognize heat stress as an urgent health and safety issue. Just four out of 65 major retailers—Adidas, Levi Strauss & Co., Nike and Next—have provided detailed direction beyond requiring suppliers to have “adequate” temperature control. H&M Group says it plans to introduce heat guidance sometime this year.
Those scant interventions aside, there’s “no support, really, from brands, either in terms of technology transfer or some kind of subsidized support that assures suppliers that if they manage heat, they will get continuous business,” Rahul said. “It’s not that brands aren’t aware. But we haven’t seen any proactive measures or negotiation happening from the brands or their home countries.”
While the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive requires large companies to address heat-related harm, the omnibus bill has shrunk the number of affected businesses by raising compliance thresholds.
Even so, ignoring extreme heat could carry hidden costs. The International Labour Organization estimated, for example, that heat stress could result in a 4.5 percent reduction in India’s gross domestic product and the loss of 35 million full-time jobs by 2030.
To connect this with what they observed on the factory floor, researchers devised a framework measuring heat stress across four linked factors: environmental load, physiological strain, metabolic load and adaptive capacity. Their Heat Stress Index averaged 58.9, placing most surveyed workers in the “high stress” category. A quarter scored above 70, putting them in “critical” condition. Other established standards, such as the Belding–Hatch Index, classify any score in the 40–60 range as “severe heat strain,” representing a clear danger to health.
Still, a key first step, Jhobta said, is to treat heat stress as a formal labor issue, integrating provisions for compensation and what she described as “self pacing” into Indian policy. She cited Qatar, which passed legislation in 2021 that lets workers remove themselves from situations where they believe heat stress is a threat to their health or safety. This kind of agency, she added, “does not exist in India right now.”
“Self-pacing is something that needs to be incorporated, especially in the garment industry, where you practically work like machines,” Jhobta said. “Your breaks are timed. Your hours are timed. There’s no scope for you to take a break for more than two minutes in a gap of two or three hours.”
But creating that kind of leverage depends on worker power—something India’s garment industry largely lacks. Estimates suggest unionization rates below 4 percent, leaving workers mostly excluded from these conversations. Caste issues further deepen the vulnerability of already marginalized groups.
Neha, also using a pseudonym, is a 36-year-old single mother in Dindigul who has worked as a sewing machine operator for nearly a decade. When she’s sweating in 40-degree Celsius heat in layers of clothing, including an apron over her usual draped sari, she sometimes feels like a broiler chicken in a pressure cooker, “just waiting to burst.”
“I chew gum to suppress thirst,” she said. “I only pee at lunch or after I reach home. That’s how I survive—by controlling my body.”
Neha calls heat stress a constant assault on her body and mind. A doctor has advised her to quit the factory, but she has few options to make ends meet. The physical and mental toll of providing her son with a decent life, however, is crushing.
“If brands could provide air coolers, maybe the factory could manage to pay for the electricity. But right now, no one helps. We’re suffering alone,” Neha said. “If brands really cared, they could change everything. We’re not asking for luxuries—just dignity and a decent wage, so our children don’t have to suffer like us. We’re abused—verbally, mentally, even sexually—and we stay silent because we can’t afford to lose our jobs. They’ve kept us in poverty.”
