For many people in South India, the day’s heat no longer ends when the sun goes down. Even late at night, bedrooms, and sometimes even the bed itself, remain warm. Ceiling fans only circulate hot air, windows stay open in the hope of a breeze that never arrives, and falling asleep takes longer than it used to. Over time, these restless nights add up to sleep loss. Scientists now say this is more than a seasonal inconvenience. It is one of the quieter ways climate change is beginning to affect everyday life.

An analysis by Climate Central estimates that people across southern India lose between 78 and 91 hours of sleep each year because nights remain too warm. About eight to nine hours of that loss is directly linked to climate change, making southern India one of the worst-affected regions outside the Middle East.

Unlike heatwaves, which make headlines for a few days, sleep loss is harder to notice. It builds slowly. One restless night becomes another, until weeks of poor sleep begin to affect health.

Why South India is Feeling It First

Puducherry records the highest annual sleep loss in the country at 92 hours per person. Andhra Pradesh follows with 88.6 hours, while Kerala is close behind at 88.3 hours. Tamil Nadu records the biggest climate change impact with 7.9 hours of additional sleep loss every year linked to rising temperatures. Karnataka follows at 7.8 hours.

These figures are not surprising when you consider how summers feel across much of South India. Unlike places where temperatures drop sharply after sunset, many parts of the region remain hot and humid well into the night. Humidity makes it harder for sweat to evaporate, which is how the body cools itself. When that cooling process slows down, getting comfortable enough to sleep becomes much harder.

That is why states that are not always the hottest during the day can still have some of the country’s warmest nights.

Cities are Holding on to the Day’s Heat

Roads, buildings and concrete surfaces soak up heat throughout the day. Instead of cooling quickly after sunset, they release that stored heat for hours, keeping neighbourhoods warmer than nearby rural areas.

Among India’s largest metros, Chennai records the highest overall sleep loss at 93 hours a year. Mumbai and Kolkata follow. Bengaluru, however, tells a different story. Known for its mild weather, the city now records the strongest climate change signal among the metros studied, with 12% of its temperature-related sleep loss linked to climate change. Hyderabad is not far behind.

Sleep Needs a Cooler Body

The body naturally lowers its temperature before entering deep sleep.

When nights stay warm, that process takes longer. People may struggle to fall asleep, wake up several times during the night or wake earlier than usual. Even if they spend enough hours in bed, the quality of sleep suffers.

Climate Central’s analysis shows that nighttime temperatures have risen faster than daytime temperatures in many parts of the world. Across the 1,338 cities studied worldwide, climate change has at least doubled temperature-related sleep loss since the early 1970s.

Why Does One Constantly Feel Tired

Older adults, women and low-income communities are among those most affected by warmer nights. Weaker immunity, heart disease, diabetes, anxiety, depression and reduced concentration have all been linked to this. Staying cool is not an option for everyone

Air conditioning can make a difference, but it remains out of reach for many households. In homes with concrete roofs, poor ventilation or unreliable electricity, indoor temperatures often remain high well after midnight. For families living in these conditions, sleep becomes another inequality shaped by climate.

Heat Plans For Day and Sleep Loss at Night

India’s heat action plans are mostly built around daytime temperatures. They issue warnings about afternoon heat, advise people to stay indoors and encourage hydration.

But the night receives far less attention. Yet it is during those cooler hours that the body is supposed to recover from the day’s heat. As nights become warmer, that recovery is becoming more difficult. Cooler buildings, more trees, better-designed neighbourhoods and affordable access to cooling will all matter if cities are to remain livable.

For millions across South India, climate change is no longer measured only by the afternoon temperature. It is measured by how often they wake up in the middle of the night, waiting for the room to cool down.

On July 7, 2026, around 11 a.m., a rumble echoed through Meppadi and a six-year-old boy ran. He had stayed home from school that day. The moment he heard the sound, he rushed to his mother, wrapped his arms around her, and refused to let go. He was trembling. For him, the sound wasn’t just noise. It was 2024 again.

The boy had survived the Chooralmala landslide that killed hundreds of his neighbours two years ago, and he has been in counselling ever since. On this day, a new landslide six kilometres away, at the Anakkompoyil–Meenakshi tunnel construction site in Kalladi, had reopened the wound.

“For him, it was like reliving the 2024 landslide,” his grandmother, Roshna Yusaf, a social worker and former Meppadi panchayat member, told EdPublica. “The moment he heard the familiar sound again, he came running and held on to his mother. He refused to stay apart.”

Meppadi is a small hill town in Wayanad, a hilly district in the southern Indian state of Kerala, set in the Western Ghats — a steep, rain-soaked mountain range that runs down India’s western coast and is globally recognised as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. It was here, in July 2024, that a series of landslides buried the neighbouring villages of Mundakkai and Chooralmala, killing hundreds of people in one of the deadliest disasters in Kerala’s history. Two years on, Meppadi panchayat — the local administrative area that includes both those villages, Kalladi, and the town itself — is still rebuilding. In July 2026, it happened again.

The Kalladi landslide killed eight people — seven migrant workers and the project’s construction manager — in a disaster that geo-scientists have since called preventable, pointing to inadequate geological and hydrological study for a tunnel driven through fragile Western Ghats terrain. Rescue operations ran for six days before all the bodies were recovered. Around 40 families from nearby Meenakshi were moved to relief camps.

For Meppadi, still rebuilding after the 2024 Chooralmala–Mundakkai disaster, it was not an isolated accident. It was a second interruption to childhoods, livelihoods, and a fragile sense of security the community had spent two years trying to rebuild.

When Childhood Is Interrupted

The six-year-old is one of many children in Meppadi still carrying the trauma of repeated landslides. For them, the sound of heavy rain or collapsing earth is enough to bring back memories they have spent months trying to overcome.

The latest disaster has again disrupted their education.

“It has been only one month since schools reopened. Now the children cannot go to school,” said Biji Zhacahi, a mother of two from Meenakshi.

“Every year, it is the children’s future that gets disrupted. Because of these repeated incidents, some children even become reluctant to go to school. As parents, we are always worried about their safety.”

Roshna pointed out how narrowly the community escaped a far larger tragedy. The Kalladi landslide struck at 11 a.m. — a school day, but after the morning rush.

“If the landslide had happened in the morning, many students could have lost their lives, because they usually board their school buses from the nearby bus stop,” she said.

For many families, interrupted schooling — and the fear of sending children to school at all — has become another fixture of every monsoon.

Women Living in Uncertainty

Repeated landslides have also reshaped daily life for women, many of whom manage households alone while their husbands work abroad.

“Women here have forgotten how to smile,” Roshna said. Years of facing one disaster after another, she said, have left many women emotionally exhausted.

“Every time it rains heavily, the same questions come back — what if another landslide happens, where do we run, how do we protect our children? The fear never really leaves.”

When Livelihoods Depend on the Weather

The uncertainty extends well beyond the home. It touches almost every livelihood in Meppadi.

“When it rains, it rains continuously for several days,” said Krishna Raj, a shop owner in Meppadi town. “Transportation becomes difficult. We have to travel to nearby towns to bring supplies for our shops, but during heavy rain that is not always possible.”

With roads frequently cut off, even running a small business becomes a gamble.

For jeep driver Mansoor Ali, every journey through the hills carries its own anxiety.

“It is very scary to drive here at night,” he said. “Whenever I hear a loud sound, I fear it is another landslide. In the dark, we don’t even know where to run. That is how most drivers here live.”

Many residents had already shifted from agriculture to tourism after repeated crop losses from wild animal attacks made farming increasingly difficult. Landslides, and the restrictions on tourist movement that follow them, have now unsettled that livelihood too.

“People moved to tourism because farming became difficult,” said Sijo, who works in the sector. “Now tourist visits and homestays have also been affected.”

For many families in Meppadi, there is no livelihood the monsoon has left untouched.

A Tunnel That Brings Hope — and Questions

Despite the tragedy at the construction site, residents largely continue to support the Anakkompoyil–Meenakshi (Kalladi–Meppadi) tunnel project. The twin-tunnel road is meant to cut straight through the hills separating hilly, landlocked Wayanad from the neighbouring coastal district of Malappuram, replacing the long, congested detour drivers currently take over the Thamarassery Ghat — a winding mountain pass notorious for accidents and traffic jams.

“We have great expectations from this project,” said Nishal, a resident of Meenakshi. “Better connectivity is something people here have needed for years.” At the same time, he added, residents are uneasy about how the construction is being carried out.

Roshna fears that soil excavated from the tunnel is being dumped on the slopes above her home. “If more soil is dumped above the mountain, many houses, including mine, could be affected,” she said. “I am 56 years old. I cannot build another house.”

Her fear echoes the explanation Kerala’s government has itself offered for the disaster: a state minister called it not a natural landslide but a man-made one, a clear case of lapse, and said the district collector had warned the tunnel’s contractor, Konkan Railway, in writing about the danger — a warning that went unheeded. Following the incident, the Kerala government suspended all construction on the Rs 2,134-crore tunnel project pending two separate investigations.

Nishal recalled that a strong artesian spring had emerged during the tunnel’s initial construction phase the previous summer. A paddy field near the site had also been cleared and filled in by the construction company, he said, and inadequate drainage afterward let water and loosened soil flow downhill. Many residents, he added, still don’t know whether they will eventually be displaced, because the project’s final alignment has never been clearly communicated to them.

“People have doubts because they don’t have clear information,” he said. “But almost everyone supports the project because we need better connectivity.”

The tension between that need and its risks is not new. A legal challenge to the tunnel had argued that it cut through an ecologically fragile region already prone to repeated landslides, and that environmental safeguards were inadequate. In April 2026, the Supreme Court declined to halt construction, calling the project one of significant public importance and leaving compliance to statutory regulators. The court settled the legal question. The Kalladi landslide reopened the scientific one.

A Disaster With a Familiar Shape

The parallels to 2024 are not just emotional; they are geological. Both disasters struck the same short stretch of hill country in Meppadi panchayat, where a thick layer of weathered, unconsolidated lateritic soil sits over highly fractured bedrock — a combination that loses its shear strength rapidly once intense rainfall raises pore-water pressure inside the slope. Researchers who studied the 2024 disaster concluded that this fragile geology, not any single cause, was what turned extreme rain into a catastrophic slope failure, and warned that the region’s concave slopes, which concentrate runoff, remain especially susceptible to future failures.

The 2024 Chooralmala–Mundakkai landslide remains one of the deadliest in Kerala’s history. Official confirmed deaths stood at 231 for months, before the state government declared all 32 people still listed as missing to be dead, in a notification issued on February 10, 2025 — a bureaucratic closing of the books that, for families, only formalised a grief they had already been living with. Independent researchers, using different counting methods, have since put the true toll considerably higher.

For Meppadi, that history is why an eight-death landslide at a tunnel site feels less like a new disaster than a recurrence — proof that a community built on some of the most landslide-prone slopes in the Western Ghats has yet to find a way to build, or to grieve, that outlasts the next monsoon.

A Town That Never Stops Recovering

For Meppadi, the latest landslide is not an isolated tragedy. It is another interruption in a recovery that never seems to end.

Children grow up carrying trauma. Women wait anxiously through every spell of rain. Workers wonder whether their livelihoods will survive another monsoon.

Yet amid the uncertainty, residents say it is the community’s solidarity that helps them move forward.

“From the NDRF and Fire and Rescue teams to local people, everyone stands together with one heart to rebuild the area,” said Meppadi Grama Panchayat President Ramla Hamza. “The resilience of the people, even after facing repeated disasters, makes these difficult times a little easier to bear.”

The rescue teams have left, and the roads will eventually reopen.

But in Meppadi, the true cost of living is not measured only in damaged homes or lost income. It is measured in a community forced to begin recovering all over again, every time the hills give way.

Ground report from Meppadi, Wayanad, Kerala, India. Some names of residents quoted appear as given to our reporter in the field.

India’s scorching summer may have ended with the arrival of the southwest monsoon, but the economic impact of months of extreme heat is only beginning to surface. The costs are visible at every level—from workers earning less because they cannot stay on the job, to households paying more for healthcare and cooling, and ultimately to the country’s economy losing billions in productivity.

New report by Adelphi Global argues that this “double burden” of falling incomes and rising medical expenses is one of the least recognized economic consequences of climate change. In a country where nearly nine out of ten workers are employed in the informal sector and households continue to shoulder a large share of healthcare costs, the financial consequences are particularly severe.

When Heat Cuts Working Hours, Incomes Fall

Extreme heat affects the economy first through labour. Unlike machines, people cannot continue working safely under prolonged exposure to high temperatures. Workers slow down, take frequent breaks or stop working altogether to avoid heat stress. Recovery from heat-related illnesses can take weeks, while severe cases may permanently reduce a person’s ability to work.

The impact is greatest in agriculture and construction, where work is physically demanding and carried out outdoors. According to the report, India already loses an average of 4.31% of annual working hours because of this. Under a moderate warming scenario, that could rise to 5.8% by 2030. In agriculture and construction, annual working-hour losses are projected to reach 9.04%, equivalent to nearly 22.5 working days each year.

For millions of workers paid by the day, fewer hours on the job mean less money taken home.

Informal Workers With Little Financial Protection

The losses are particularly severe because most Indian workers lack social protection. The report estimates that 90% of women workers and 86% of men work in the informal economy, where paid leave, health insurance and wage protection are rare. Missing work because of extreme heat often means losing income immediately.

Median daily earnings remain modest even before these disruptions. Women earn about USD 18.72 (PPP) per day, while men earn around USD 25.52 (PPP). Repeated income losses can quickly push vulnerable households deeper into financial distress.

The report warns that between 54% and 80% of informal workers globally already earn below median wages. In India, where nearly one-fourth of the population lives below the World Bank’s lower-middle-income poverty line, recurring heat-related work losses could push even more families into poverty.

Rising Temperatures Raising Household Expenses

The financial impact does not stop when workers leave the job site. Heat-related illnesses increase medical spending at a time when incomes are already falling. Although public spending on healthcare has increased, households still pay 44% of India’s total health expenditure directly from their own pockets.

Annual per capita out-of-pocket health expenditure reached USD 151 (PPP) in 2023—almost three times higher than in 2000. Extreme heat also raises everyday living costs.

Keeping homes cool becomes more expensive during hotter months. While wealthier households spend only around 0.2–0.25% of their total expenditure on air-conditioning, the poorest households may spend up to 8% of their household budget on electricity for cooling. Researchers describe this growing financial burden as “heat poverty”—where families struggle to afford adequate cooling despite rising temperatures.

Due to this, food prices are also expected to rise. Higher temperatures alone could increase global headline inflation by up to 1.18% and food inflation by as much as 3.23% by 2035. Together, these costs create a financial squeeze: households earn less while spending more.

The Bigger Economic Picture

The report argues that these household-level losses eventually add up to a national economic challenge. According to Lancet Countdown, India lost about USD 194 billion in potential income because of reduced labour capacity caused by extreme heat in 2024. That is equivalent to roughly 5% of the country’s GDP.

Globally, the economic impact is equally significant. Between 1981 and 2010, heat exposure resulted in the equivalent loss of 35 million full-time jobs and reduced global GDP by an estimated USD 280 billion. Between 1992 and 2013, climate-driven extreme heat caused economic losses estimated at USD 16–50 trillion worldwide.

The findings show that extreme heat is no longer only an environmental or public health concern. It is becoming a growing economic challenge, particularly for labour-intensive economies like India.

Rising Heat: Need for Economic Policy

Adapting to extreme heat requires more than emergency weather advisories.

It calls for stronger labour protections, income support for workers affected by heat, expanded social protection for informal workers and greater public investment in healthcare to reduce dependence on out-of-pocket spending. It also recommends increasing adaptation finance to address productivity losses and the economic consequences of heat-related illnesses.

As climate change makes India’s summers hotter and longer, the true cost of extreme heat will be reflected in shrinking pay packets, rising household expenses and slower economic growth.