Climate-driven heat exposed 117 million people in India to a month or more of risky heat between June and August 2026, according to a Climate Central analysis.

Between June and August this year, 117 million people in India spent a month or more under heat that would have been far less likely without a warming planet. That single number, from a new global analysis by Climate Central, puts India at the top of the world’s list for population exposed to climate-driven risky heat — ahead of China’s 94 million and Indonesia’s 83 million.

The finding sits inside a larger, starker pattern. Worldwide, over 1.5 billion people experienced 30 or more days of risky heat that climate change made significantly more likely this summer. On any single day of the season, more than a quarter of humanity felt a strong climate change signal in the local temperature. Climate Central’s scientists tracked this using their Climate Shift Index (CSI), which measures how much more likely a given day’s warmth was because of climate change, and flagged “risky heat days” as those hotter than 90% of what a place recorded between 1991 and 2020 — the threshold at which heat starts to strain the body.

The Global Climate-Driven Heat Scoreboard

Europe came out the most unusually hot continent on the planet this year, even though it was not the most populous one affected. Eighty-nine per cent of Europeans — nearly nine in ten — spent a month or more under risky heat. France and the Holy See tied for the largest temperature anomaly of any country, running 3.5°C above their historical norm, and seven of the world’s ten most abnormally hot countries were European. Fifty-four countries recorded their hottest June-to-August since 1970, France, Italy and the United Kingdom among them.

Asia, by contrast, carried the largest raw number of people through this heat: 2.8 billion, or 58% of the continent’s population, spent 30 days or more under conditions strongly shaped by climate change. India and Egypt were the two countries where more than 100 million people each crossed that threshold.

Africa’s story shows up less in totals and more in persistence. Six African countries spent at least 95% of the entire three-month period under a strong climate change influence — Rwanda for 91 days, Uganda for 89, Ethiopia for 88. For those populations, the season did not have an unusually hot patch; nearly the whole summer was one.

In North America, four in five people in the United States lived through a month’s worth of risky summer heat, with the average American gaining 23 such days from climate change and the average Canadian gaining 17.

India’s numbers, city by city

Nationally, India ran 0.7°C warmer than its 1991–2020 June-to-August average, and the average Indian experienced climate change’s fingerprint on local temperature for 39 days across the three months — better than a third of the entire season.

City-level data obtained alongside the release shows how unevenly that heat landed.

Source: Climate Central, June–August 2026 city dataset.

Two different stories run through these columns, and conflating them misses the point.

Mumbai tops the country for sheer duration: 86 of the 92 days in the season carried a strong climate change signal, more than any other Indian city measured. But of Mumbai’s 24 risky heat days, only four were added by climate change — the city runs hot most of the year regardless, so the climate contribution to its worst days is comparatively small. Pune and Nashik, sitting in Mumbai’s own state, show almost the opposite ratio: nearly every risky heat day they had this summer would not have happened without climate change.

Chennai had both the most risky heat days in the country — 40 — and the most added by climate change — 30. That combination makes it the city where the analysis draws the clearest straight line between a hot summer and a warming climate. Tiruchirappalli and Madurai, both in Tamil Nadu, follow the same pattern: every risky heat day counted in each city was one climate change made more likely.

Srinagar is the outlier worth pausing on. A city known for temperate summers recorded 53 risky heat days, more than any other Indian city in the dataset, of which 29 were attributed to climate change — a scale of departure from its own historical baseline far larger than what Mumbai or Delhi saw from theirs.

Where the heat did not arrive

Not every Indian city ran hotter than usual. Jaipur’s seasonal average came in 0.4°C below its 1991–2020 norm, Kota 0.2°C below, and Bhopal 0.1°C below — small numbers, but real ones, in a summer when most of the country and the world trended the other way. Even so, none of the three escaped the climate signal entirely: Jaipur still logged three risky heat days attributable to climate change, Kota three, Bhopal one. The exceptions are a reminder that a warming climate does not raise every thermometer in lockstep, even as it raises the odds almost everywhere.

What the numbers are measuring

The CSI framework Climate Central uses does not ask whether a heatwave happened — it asks how much more likely climate change made it. A CSI level of 2 or higher, the threshold used throughout this analysis, means the day’s warmth was at least twice as likely because of the human-driven build-up of greenhouse gases. That is a probability statement about cause, not a one-off weather reading, which is what allows the same framework to compare Mumbai’s long hot stretch against Chennai’s sharper, more clearly climate-driven spike.

Kristina Dahl, Climate Central’s vice president for science, described the pattern as one where “human-driven warming is pushing communities beyond safe physical limits” — a line written with Europe and North America in mind as much as South Asia. The India numbers suggest the same pressure is arriving unevenly within a single country: some cities absorbing a long, low-grade climate signal across most of the summer, others taking a shorter but far sharper hit concentrated into their worst weeks.

A Rs 17,000-crore-plus tunnel road was meant to cut Bengaluru’s commute times. Instead, it ran into a three-billion-year-old rock — and a government now scrambling to find another way through. EdPublica visits Lalbagh Botanical Garden and speaks to the people who walk through it every day.The Lalbagh tunnel road has become the clearest test yet of how far public pressure can move a government once a decision looks final.

It is early morning at Lalbagh’s West Gate, and walkers are already streaming in — no ticket needed at this hour, the entry stays free until nine. Somewhere past the bougainvillea, the Rose Garden is waking up in the mist, and a flock of parakeets is making its usual racket around the glasshouse. For most of the people filing in, this is simply the start of another day — a walk, a stretch, a bit of quiet before Bengaluru’s traffic takes over. Few of them are thinking about what lies beneath their feet: a proposed ten-lane road tunnel that, on paper, was meant to run straight through this ground.

The autorickshaw driver who dropped this reporter near the gate had his own way of putting it. He’d seen the protest that filled the park on a Sunday morning not long ago — thousands of people, banners, a human chain stretching around the old rock. He didn’t have strong views either way about tunnels and traffic, he said, but he’d noticed something: when the government backed down on the law that triggered it all, and signalled it might route the project around the garden instead of under it, people he spoke to seemed relieved. Since then, he said, he’d been getting more fares to Lalbagh than usual — visitors curious, it seemed, about the garden that had been all over the news.

Rajendar, who lives in Jigani on the city’s southern edge and drives roughly ninety minutes to visit, put it more simply. He comes for the green, he said — for a couple of hours where the air feels different, away from the concrete and the horns. A garden like this, he felt, was not something the city had many more of to spare.

Not everyone was willing to be named. A corporate employee, mid-morning break, walking briskly along the lake path, agreed to talk only on condition of anonymity. His view was blunt: whatever the traffic problem is, running infrastructure like this under a garden like Lalbagh is not the way to solve it. The government, he said, needs to reconsider — and find a fix that doesn’t ask a 240-acre lung space to absorb the cost.

A garden older than the city’s traffic problem

Lalbagh’s story predates the automobile by more than a century. Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore, laid it out in 1760 as a private garden modelled partly on Mughal design; his son Tipu Sultan expanded it with plants brought back from campaigns and trading contacts across the region. British superintendents took over after, adding the glasshouse in 1890 — built, like much of the era’s civic architecture, in conscious echo of London’s Crystal Palace — and the garden has hosted its twin flower shows around Republic Day and Independence Day ever since.

Today it holds more than 1,850 plant species across 240 acres, including a roughly 250-year-old silk cotton tree said to date to Tipu Sultan’s time, and the Lalbagh Rock — a granite-gneiss outcrop now estimated by geologists to be about three billion years old, among the oldest exposed rock formations anywhere on the peninsula. A watchtower built during the reign of Kempegowda II sits on it. Campaigners have been pushing to have the rock considered for UNESCO recognition, in the same conversation as sites like Hampi.

That rock, and the ground around it, is precisely what the tunnel road project has to pass through.

Lalbagh’s fight is, in that sense, a small and very local chapter of a much bigger story. UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report 2024 found that the average share of green space in cities worldwide fell from 19.5 per cent in 1990 to just 13.9 per cent by 2020 — and the decline has been sharper still in this part of the world, with East and Southeast Asia’s urban green cover dropping from 32.5 per cent to 18.6 per cent over the same period. Every city loses its green space to something that looks, at the time, like a reasonable trade-off — a road, a housing block, a transit line. Bengaluru’s version of that trade-off currently runs 50 to 100 feet under a botanical garden.

What the Lalbagh Tunnel Road Project actually proposes

The Bengaluru Tunnel Road — sometimes called the Twin Tunnel Road — is planned to run 16.5 to 16.75 kilometres between Hebbal in the north and Central Silk Board in the south, largely beneath the Outer Ring Road corridor. Its cost has been quoted at different points as roughly INR 17,000 crore, INR17,698 crore and, more recently, INR 22,267 crore, after Adani Group entities were reported to have won the contract. As originally designed, the alignment required roughly six acres of Lalbagh land — most of it temporary, during construction — for two entry and exit ramps and a ventilation shaft, with one ramp passing within a few hundred metres of Lalbagh Lake and another running close to the rock formation itself, at depths of 50 to 100 feet.

What the reports found

Three separate technical reports have shaped the debate, and none of them offer the government much comfort.

A Geotechnical Interpretative Report prepared for the city’s civic body by Rodic Consultants, dated September 2024, flagged the Lalbagh stretch as a “bedrock transition zone” and noted a geological lineament — a fault-like feature — crossing the proposed alignment near the lake, along with risks of groundwater seepage and seasonal water-table shifts.

A Geological Survey of India expert committee went further. Its report, submitted to the government in April 2026, warned that tunnelling and blasting near the rock could widen existing cracks, destabilise parts of the formation, and disturb groundwater flows into Lalbagh Lake — and separately flagged risk to the historic Kempegowda watchtower. GSI also noted civil-society efforts to have the rock nominated as a UNESCO site.

A third, independent study — by the Sustainable Transportation Lab at the Indian Institute of Science, led by Professor Ashish Verma — questioned the project’s basic logic rather than its geology. Modelling suggested the tunnel would carry only around 1,200 passengers per hour per direction, against roughly 69,000 for a nine-coach metro line built at comparable cost; in a high-toll scenario, the study projected the tunnel’s volume-to-capacity ratio could fall as low as 0.1 — a road built for far more traffic than would likely use it. The same analysis suggested the project could, in some scenarios, add to the city’s overall emissions rather than cut them, by drawing commuters away from mass transit and towards private cars.

The law that lit the fuse

If one thing turned this from a planning dispute into a street movement, it was a single piece of legislation.

The Karnataka Government Parks (Preservation) (Amendment) Bill, 2026, amends a 1975 law that has, until now, given government parks and gardens fairly strong statutory protection. The amendment inserts a new provision allowing the state to “alienate” — that is, sell, lease, gift, exchange, mortgage or otherwise transfer — up to 5 per cent of the total area of any government park or garden in Karnataka, for specified public infrastructure and utility projects. Applied to a 240-acre site like Lalbagh, that threshold works out to roughly 12 acres, twice what the tunnel’s original design was reported to need.

The government’s case is that the change is generic policy, not a Lalbagh-specific fix: Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar has said it is meant to enable ordinary public works, such as road-widening, without the cost and delay of separately acquiring private land, and that the provision does not open parkland to private developers — land can only be leased, transferred or exchanged to government departments, statutory authorities and local bodies. Critics were not persuaded. The Bill was cleared by the Cabinet and passed by both Houses of the legislature on 24 August 2026 amid opposition protests inside the Assembly and, its critics say, with little substantive debate — timing that, coming as the tunnel’s alignment through Lalbagh was already under challenge in court, read to many as a legislative route around the garden’s protections rather than a coincidence.

How the fight unfolded

The reaction outside the legislature was faster than the government seemed to expect. Within three days of the Bill’s passage, more than 200 citizens, resident groups and environmental organisations gathered at Lalbagh on 27 August to form a human chain around the ancient rock, demanding the amendment be withdrawn. That Sunday, 30 August, the numbers swelled into the thousands for a march titled “Walk in Lalbagh, Walk for Lalbagh” — residents, walkers’ associations, cycling groups and pro-Kannada organisations alongside Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya, Union Minister Shobha Karandlaje and other BJP lawmakers, plus veteran environmentalist A.N. Yellappa Reddy. Marchers sat and lay across the Peninsular Gneiss rock itself and raised slogans in Kannada and English with a common refrain: not one inch of Lalbagh.

The mobilisation built on opposition that had already been running for months through the courts — public-interest litigation in the Karnataka High Court led in part by theatre personality Prakash Belawadi and civic figures including Adikesavalu Ravindra and N.S. Mukunda, and an earlier, smaller human chain in early August aimed specifically at protecting the geological monument from the tunnel.

Facing that pressure, and with BJP leaders petitioning the Governor to withhold assent to the Bill, the state Cabinet withdrew it within days, on 3 September 2026. Shivakumar said the legislation would be reintroduced later, after wider public consultation — it has not been dropped for good. A week after that, on 9 September, he went a step further and said he had asked Greater Bengaluru Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda to study alternatives to using Lalbagh land for the tunnel. That is an instruction to examine options, not a decision to reroute — no revised alignment has been published, and the original six-acre land requirement, the detailed project report and the tender awarded to Adani entities all remain officially in force.

Several petitioners have said they intend to keep challenging the project on transport and procedural grounds regardless of what happens to the amendment or the alignment. Their case — over the withheld 2025 expert report, the missing environmental impact assessment and questions about statutory transport-authority approvals — is due back before the Karnataka High Court in December.

A retreat, not a resolution

For now, the garden itself shows no sign of the fight above and around it. The lake is calm, the rock still draws its usual scatter of visitors reading the noticeboard about its age, and the morning walkers keep coming. What has shifted is something real but narrower than it looks: a government caught off guard by how fast a legislative manoeuvre turned into a mass protest, and forced into a public climbdown within ten days of passing a law.

That is not the same as Lalbagh being safe. The amendment is shelved, not repealed, and Shivakumar has said it will return after “consultation.” The instruction to study a route around the garden is exactly that — a study, with no published alternative and no change yet to the project’s land requirement, tender or contractor. The Geological Survey of India’s warnings about the rock, the watchtower and the groundwater, submitted in April and made public only in September, have not been formally answered. And the oldest thread of opposition — the court case over how the project was tendered and cleared in the first place — continues in December, indifferent to whichever way the alignment eventually bends.

So the honest answer, for Rajendar driving in from Jigani, or for the corporate employee unwilling to give his name, is not that they won. It is that a fight most people assumed was already lost turned out not to be — and that the next few months, in a courtroom and in a minister’s office rather than at a human chain, will decide whether that counts for anything.

Lumpy Skin Disease in Rajasthan has returned to the Bharatpur division, with 6,694 cattle infected across five districts. Livestock owners fear a repeat of the devastating 2022-23 outbreak.

Lumpy Skin Disease has returned to Rajasthan, bringing back painful memories from four years ago. For now, the infection remains confined to the Bharatpur division. Cases began to surface in the division in August, and the disease has since spread rapidly. As of September 3, a total of 6,694 cattle have been found infected across five districts of the division. These include 4,000 animals in Deeg, 2,500 in Bharatpur, 124 in Dholpur, 69 in Karauli and one in Sawai Madhopur.

Following the spread of the infection, the administration has banned cattle fairs, animal exhibitions and other gatherings involving animals in the Bharatpur division. More than two dozen animals have died in the affected areas in recent days. According to the Animal Husbandry Department, 13 of these deaths have been confirmed to be caused by Lumpy Skin Disease. Information obtained from district animal husbandry officials shows that six animals have died of the disease in Bharatpur district and seven in Deeg. A total of 21 animals have died in Deeg in recent days, but only seven deaths have so far been confirmed as being caused by Lumpy. Reports on the remaining deaths are still awaited.

However, given the situation in Bharatpur division, the administration has now tightened measures to control the spread of the disease. On September 3, Divisional Commissioner Nalini Kathotia directed officials to immediately stop animal markets, livestock fairs and the mass movement of animals in Bharatpur, Dholpur, Deeg, Karauli and Sawai Madhopur. Officials have also been directed to ensure the availability of medicines to control external parasites in affected areas, carry out disinfection, organise treatment camps and safely dispose of dead animals as per the prescribed protocol.

Divisional Commissioner Nalini Kathotia has also raised concerns over the vaccination coverage. A review found that only 49.92 per cent of the total cattle population in Dholpur, 64.14 per cent in Karauli and 60.16 per cent in Sawai Madhopur had been vaccinated. The Divisional Commissioner termed the coverage unsatisfactory and directed the concerned officials to ensure that the vaccination target is achieved in full.

Lumpy Skin Disease in Rajasthan: Vaccination Gaps and Rising Concerns

Following the spread of the disease, the Animal Husbandry Department has stepped up surveillance and vaccination. But livestock owners are also raising questions about whether adequate vaccination was carried out before the disease began spreading.

Brahmdev Shastri, a People for Animals activist and farmer from Kaman in Bharatpur, alleges that a large number of cows have been infected and that the situation worsened because vaccination was not carried out on time.

“Instructions had been issued to start vaccination in June, but the Animal Husbandry Department officials and employees remained asleep. Vaccination did not take place in most areas. Meanwhile, infections among animals began in August. Before anyone could realise what was happening, the infection had spread to thousands of animals. The department has now woken up. Department teams are now reaching villages one by one,” he says.

The Animal Husbandry Department has taken these complaints seriously. Officials posted in Bharatpur, Sawai Madhopur, Karauli, Dholpur and Deeg have been issued notices seeking explanations.

Department officials, however, say vaccination could not be carried out in several places because vaccines were not available on time. In Nadbai town of Bharatpur district, where there have been complaints that vaccination did not take place for two months, Deputy Director of Animal Husbandry Dr Rajesh Chaudhary says 4,000 doses were received on June 16 and administered to animals in surrounding areas. After that, there was no vaccine available. The next consignment arrived on August 6 and vaccination began the following day, August 7.

As of September 3, 915 animals have been found infected in the Nadbai area, including 32 animals detected on September 3. The relief, however, is that 605 of the infected animals have recovered.

Department teams are also now reaching Brahmdev Shastri’s village, Bamni. He says several animals had already fallen ill by the time the teams arrived.

“Teams are now reaching our village, Bamni, but by then many animals had already been affected. Because vaccination had not been done, a cow at my son’s home in the village contracted Lumpy and fell ill. We are now getting her treated,” he says.

He says two cows at his farmhouse in Kaman had been vaccinated on time and remained safe.

There is also considerable anxiety over Lumpy in Deeg, where 4,000 animals had been found infected as of September 3. Local voluntary organisations are helping care for sick and abandoned animals. Pratap Prajapat, a worker with the Bajrangi Goseva Samiti in Deeg, says, “You can see infected animals everywhere. We are taking sick, abandoned animals to gaushalas and getting them treated.”

The fear of four years ago

The current outbreak is particularly worrying for livestock owners because they witnessed the devastating impact of the disease in 2022-23. According to government figures, 76,030 cows died of Lumpy Skin Disease in Rajasthan during that period. The government provided assistance of Rs 40,000 per cow to 48,892 livestock owners for the deaths of 51,430 milch cows. Livestock owners, however, claim that the actual number of deaths was much higher than the official figure.

This time, the infection is still confined to the Bharatpur division, but the fear has travelled much farther.

In Hanumangarh, 529 km from Bharatpur, livestock owners are also worried. Bag Ali, a cattle owner living in Sector 12, has 40 cows, and his family depends on them for their livelihood.

“Hearing that Lumpy is spreading again is frightening in itself. We have 40 cows and our family survives because of them. God forbid they should face a crisis like Lumpy again,” he says.

When Lumpy spread in the area in 2022, six of his cows were infected. Five of them died, but he received compensation for only two.

“The government rules required a slip showing that the cow had been treated at a government veterinary hospital. We had treatment slips from the government hospital for two cows, while we had the remaining cows treated by private doctors,” he says.

Bag Ali says, “Four years ago, every livestock owner in the area had to suffer the loss of cows. Now, hearing that Lumpy is raising its head again is very disturbing.”

As of September 3, no animal has been found infected in Hanumangarh. Surveillance and vaccination have nevertheless been started as a precaution. According to officials, the district has set a target of vaccinating 380,000 cattle, of which around 363,000 have already been vaccinated.

The threat and the government’s preparedness

Dr Lakshman Shridhar Rao, Additional Director at the Animal Husbandry Department headquarters in Jaipur, says that as of September 3, Lumpy Skin Disease cases in Rajasthan remain confined to the Bharatpur division. The department has not received information about infected animals from any other district.

According to him, the Bharatpur division shares a border with Uttar Pradesh, where Lumpy cases have been reported. There is a possibility that the infection reached Bharatpur through stray animals coming into Rajasthan from Uttar Pradesh.

Dr Rao says the Lumpy situation is not limited to Rajasthan. Cases have been reported in several states across the country, and the respective states are taking steps to control the disease. Rajasthan, too, has increased surveillance and vaccination.

However, the risk of the disease cannot be assessed only on the basis of the number of animals currently infected. The National Institute of Veterinary Epidemiology and Disease Informatics (ICAR-NIVEDI), under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), through its National Animal Disease Referral Expert System (NADRES) V2, has issued a forewarning for Lumpy Skin Disease for November 2026. The forecast includes Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Manipur, Odisha, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura and Uttarakhand.

The forewarning does not confirm that the disease will spread in these states. It is a forecast of the potential risk of Lumpy Skin Disease in November 2026 based on available data. Rajasthan’s inclusion is significant because, according to the department, as of September 3 the infection had been detected only in the Bharatpur division.

In this context, a media report published on September 1, 2026, citing an ICAR-NIVEDI forecast, spoke of a possible Lumpy Skin Disease risk in around 220 districts across the country. According to the report, these included 27 districts in Bihar, 25 in Tamil Nadu, 18 each in Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Karnataka, 12 in Manipur, 11 in Goa, 10 in Madhya Pradesh, nine in West Bengal, seven in Uttar Pradesh and two in Himachal Pradesh.

However, the figure of 220 districts is different from the November 2026 state-wise forewarning. The official November forewarning names 16 states and Union Territories, while the report citing 220 districts refers to a district-level risk forecast. Neither figure should be treated as the number of districts where the disease is currently present.

The impact could go beyond livestock owners

If Lumpy spreads further, its impact will not be limited to livestock owners. According to the 2019 Livestock Census, Rajasthan had 13.938 million cattle, and the livelihoods of millions of families depend on animal husbandry. Cattle fairs and animal markets are also an important part of the rural economy. At present, restrictions on such activities are limited to the Bharatpur division, but if the disease spreads widely, such activities could be affected across the state.

Dr Santosh Rajpurohit, former state president of the Rajasthan Economic Council, says, “If the infection reaches other districts, it will affect not only animal husbandry but also cattle fairs, animal markets and the rural economy linked to them. Our economy is agriculture-based, and animal husbandry is closely linked to agriculture. The dairy business is directly connected to it. When animals die, it is as if the backbone of livestock owners is broken.”

Rajpurohit says, “The government should launch a campaign on a war footing so that Lumpy does not spread further.”

For livestock owners who went through the 2022 crisis, the return of Lumpy is therefore more than just news about a disease. When a cow falls sick or dies, it means losing a part of the family’s income. And when the very name of the disease brings back memories of animals that died and families that suffered four years ago, fear reaches their homes even before the infection numbers rise.

For now, the government machinery says it has stepped up surveillance and vaccination. The question is whether these measures will be enough to keep the disease confined to the Bharatpur division this time.

For livestock owners, however, real relief will come only if they do not have to see the kind of devastation they witnessed in 2022 all over again.