In May 2026, Delhi recorded temperatures above above 43°C, with some stations reaching 44°C. Banda in Uttar Pradesh reached 47.6°C and Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh climbed to 46.0°C. Millions of construction workers, street vendors, delivery personnel and other informal labourers are suffering the brunt of this heat in their daily work. As another severe heatwave grips large parts of India, it is exposing a deeper weakness in the country's urban development model — cities continue to depend on migrant workers who remain largely unprotected from the climate risks that increasingly shape urban life. The consequences are becoming familiar. Each summer across the Indo-Gangetic plain, temperatures push beyond safe limits for sustained outdoor work. Informal workers leave cities for villages that can barely absorb them, only to return when conditions ease. The same pattern was visible during the COVID-19 lockdowns and during successive flooding seasons. What was once treated as an exceptional disruption is a recurring feature of urban India. India’s poorest states could bear the brunt of severe heatwaves Describing this as a failure of urban governance, though accurate, does not go far enough. Decades of rapid urbanisation driven by economic opportunity have produced a city-building trajectory in which informal labour integration became the default rather than a transitional stage. The result is a permanently provisional workforce without tenure security, portable welfare or meaningful protection against the thermal extremes now intensifying across the subcontinent. India's internal migrant population already exceeded 400 million people in 2023. The next year, the heatwave season displaced 5.4 million workers from urban employment, while wet-bulb temperatures across parts of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh approached thresholds that climate physiology identifies as the outer boundary of survivable outdoor exposure without mechanical cooling. Against this backdrop, the absence of protective policy is striking. Research from IIT Gandhinagar published in