City Heat Action Plan Implementation in India: How the UofT India Foundation Is Closing the Gap

India's summers are getting hotter, longer, and more dangerous. As heatwaves intensify, city heat action plan implementation in India has become one of the most urgent priorities for urban governance. While hundreds of cities now have Heat Action Plans (HAPs) on paper, turning those plans into real, on-the-ground protection remains a major challenge — one that organizations like the UofT India Foundation (UTIF) are working directly to solve.

The Rise of Heat Action Plans in India

Heat Action Plans emerged in India after a devastating 2010 heatwave in Ahmedabad caused over a thousand excess deaths, prompting the city to adopt the country's first comprehensive HAP in 2013. That plan, developed with public health and international research partners, became a model for heat governance across South Asia.

Since then, adoption has scaled rapidly. According to government data, over 250 cities and districts across 23 heat-prone states now have operational Heat Action Plans, with states like Delhi, Rajasthan, and Tamil Nadu institutionalizing measures such as graded heat alerts, cooling stations for informal workers, and urban cooling guidelines that promote cool roofs and green infrastructure.

Why Implementation Is the Real Challenge

Having a plan is not the same as protecting people. Experts and researchers consistently point to an implementation gap as the biggest weakness in India's heat governance system. Common shortfalls include:

• Limited integration with urban planning — Most HAPs focus on emergency response rather than long-term strategies like green infrastructure, land-use planning, or building codes.
• Weak monitoring and feedback loops — Many cities lack systems to track whether interventions are actually reducing heat-related illness or mortality, or to update plans based on results.
• Underused low-cost solutions — Despite being flagged by India's National Disaster Management Authority as a cost-effective mitigation strategy, cool roofs remain rarely adopted across existing HAPs.
• Fragmented collaboration — Effective implementation requires coordination across municipal bodies, public health departments, meteorological agencies, and community organizations — a level of intersectoral alignment many cities still struggle to achieve.

Research evaluating early HAPs across Indian cities has found that while emergency response elements are often well developed, longer-term, structural elements of heat resilience are consistently under-addressed.

UofT India Foundation's Approach: The Jalgaon Model

This is where the UofT India Foundation's work stands out. In Jalgaon, Maharashtra, UTIF is partnering with the Mahila Housing Trust and the Jalgaon Municipal Corporation on a project called Promoting Cooling and Thermal Comfort in Jalgaon, aimed at co-developing an evidence-backed Heat Action Plan for nearly 600,000 residents.

What makes this initiative distinct is its emphasis on implementation, not just planning:

1. Participatory, ward-level vulnerability assessments Rather than applying a generic city-wide strategy, the project identifies specific heat-vulnerable wards through participatory methods, ensuring interventions are targeted where they matter most.

2. Piloting real cooling interventions The initiative goes beyond drafting policy by piloting tangible solutions such as cool roofing, directly addressing one of the most commonly recommended but underused strategies in Indian HAPs.

3. Institutional capacity-building A core part of the project involves equipping Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) with the monitoring, evaluation, and training capacity needed to sustain heat resilience efforts long after the initial two-year initiative ends — directly tackling the feedback-loop gap seen in earlier HAPs nationwide.

4. Academic and community collaboration By combining University of Toronto faculty expertise with local partner knowledge from Mahila Housing Trust and municipal authorities, the project reflects the kind of intersectoral collaboration that researchers say is essential — but often missing — in Indian heat governance.

A Model for Other Indian Cities

The Jalgaon Heat Action Plan is designed to do more than protect one city. As a demonstrated model of community-led, evidence-based climate adaptation, it offers a replicable framework that other mid-sized Indian cities can adapt as they build their own heat resilience strategies. This mirrors a broader pattern in Indian heat governance, where successful city-level plans — like Ahmedabad's — have historically served as templates for dozens of others.

The Road Ahead

As climate change continues to intensify heatwaves across India, the gap between having a Heat Action Plan and truly implementing one will define how well cities protect their most vulnerable residents. Initiatives like the UofT India Foundation's Jalgaon project show what closing that gap can look like: grounded in local vulnerability data, backed by academic research, and built for long-term institutional resilience rather than short-term response.

For India's rapidly urbanizing cities, this kind of collaborative, implementation-first approach may well become the standard — not the exception — for effective heat action planning in the years ahead.