(UCA News) — Stand at the edge of a paddy field in Odisha in March, and you will understand what climate change feels like from the ground.

The sun is already merciless by eight in the morning, pressing down on cracked earth that should still carry some winter moisture. The farmer who has worked this land his entire life squints at a sky that offers nothing.

The heat has arrived earlier than it used to and is sharper than it was, and it will not leave for months. A few hundred kilometers away, in a crowded Mumbai residential building, an elderly man fans himself throughout a night that refuses to cool, his heart straining against the heat the city has never recorded before.

These are not isolated stories. They are India’s new normal, and they carry a public health toll that is only beginning to be fully understood.

India is among the countries most exposed to climate-related health risks, and the reasons are structural as much as geographic.

A vast population — large numbers of whom work outdoors, live in informal settlements, or depend directly on land and water for survival — means that environmental stress translates quickly into human suffering.

When the temperature rises, it is the construction worker on an open site, the agricultural laborer bent over in a field, and the rickshaw puller navigating a concrete city who bear the first and heaviest blow.

Heat exhaustion and heatstroke are no longer occasional emergencies; they are seasonal realities in states like Rajasthan, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra,........

© Eurasia Review