Thinking · Duty of Care

Heat is now a workplace duty of care in India. What the OSHWC Code does and does not require.

Abhijith Magal · 20 September 2026 · 10 min read

Does Indian law require employers to protect workers from heat? Yes in general words, no in specific ones. Since 21 November 2025, when the Ministry of Labour and Employment brought the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 into force through notification S.O. 5321(E), every establishment the Code covers has carried a statutory duty to keep its workplace free from hazards likely to cause injury or occupational disease. Heat qualifies on any honest reading. The Code simply never says so. There is no heat standard, no wet-bulb limit and no mandated rest cycle, which leaves the heat duty of care in India's workplaces real and undefined at the same time. For an employer, that is the most expensive combination to carry.

The exposure behind it is measured, not argued. The Lancet Countdown's 2025 India data sheet puts the loss from heat at 247 billion potential labour hours in 2024, a record 419 hours per person, with agriculture carrying 66 per cent of it and construction 20 per cent. The same sheet values the income lost to heat-reduced labour capacity that year at USD 194 billion. We read those numbers in operating terms in five India numbers, and what each one costs you.

What does the OSHWC Code require employers to do about heat?

Section 6 does the heavy lifting. It obliges every employer to ensure the workplace is free from hazards which cause or are likely to cause injury or occupational disease, and to provide and maintain, as far as is reasonably practicable, a working environment that is safe and without risk to the health of employees. For factories, mines, docks, building and construction work and plantations, section 6(2) goes further: safe systems of work, and the information, instruction, training and supervision needed to keep people healthy at work.

Nothing in that language excludes a hazard because it arrives with the weather. Heat stroke and heat exhaustion are injuries to health. A roofing crew sent up at two in the afternoon in May is working in an environment an inspector could reasonably call unsafe.

Three more provisions matter once heat is on the table. Section 6 carries a free annual health examination for prescribed classes of employees, and the Central Rules notified on 8 May 2026 set that for workers above 40 in specified sectors. Section 23 lists potable drinking water, ventilation, temperature and humidity among the working conditions the Centre may prescribe. And the Code gives every employee a right most employers have not yet thought through: an employee with a reasonable apprehension of imminent danger to health can raise it with the employer and, at the same time, with the inspector-cum-facilitator. If the employer accepts the danger exists, immediate remedial action follows and a report goes to the inspector. If the employer disagrees, the matter still goes to the inspector, whose decision on whether the danger exists is final.

Read that again with a 45-degree afternoon in mind. It is the closest thing Indian law has to a heat stop-work mechanism, and it already sits in the statute.

What does the OSHWC Code not require?

It does not name heat. Writing in LiveLaw in July 2026, public health lawyer Purva Singh argued that the Code leaves heat illness and heat death unrecognised as occupational hazards, so they get handled more like acts of nature than risks somebody had a duty to control.

It does not set a number. Section 23 says the employer shall maintain such health, safety and working conditions as may be prescribed by the Central Government, and that the Centre may prescribe standards on ventilation, temperature and humidity. May, not shall. The old Factories Act was sharper. Its section 13 required every factory to secure a temperature that gave workers reasonable conditions of comfort and prevented injury to health, let the state government prescribe standards and measuring instruments, and allowed the Chief Inspector to order specific measures where temperatures ran excessively high. Deepa Padmar of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy told Mongabay in May 2026 that states including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat had used that power to notify wet-bulb ceilings of 30°C, beyond which work counted as unsafe. Section 23 moved the prescribing power to the Centre.

The Central Rules narrowed the gap without closing it. G.S.R. 345(E) of 8 May 2026 carries real heat duties in its health and safety chapter: for factories, protection from extreme weather including changed working hours, a heat-stress risk assessment where employees face extreme heat and humidity, work-rest cycles in a shaded, air-conditioned or cooler space, drinking water with electrolytes, training to recognise heat-stress symptoms, and withdrawal of workers when symptoms appear. Building and construction work carries a parallel set. What no rule carries, anywhere in the text, is a number. No temperature ceiling, no wet-bulb limit, no trigger that tells an employer when those duties switch on.

And the Code does not reach everyone. It applies to establishments with ten or more workers, with worker-count thresholds for factories that can leave out the smallest and hottest units. Gig and platform workers are outside it altogether, covered instead by the Code on Social Security. Heat action plans and disaster-authority advisories fill some of the space, and they advise. Few carry a penalty.

Why is a vague duty riskier for an employer than a strict one?

A standard is a floor you can stand on. Meet the number, keep the log, and the inspection is over. A general duty works the other way round. Nobody tells you in advance what "reasonably practicable" meant on 14 May at a site in Nagpur. Someone decides afterwards, usually after a worker has collapsed, and decides on the evidence you kept.

That evidence question is now wider than labour law. In M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024), the Supreme Court recognised a right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change under Articles 21 and 14. It sets no heat standard for any employer. It does make it harder to argue that heat is weather and nobody's responsibility.

A hydration drive in April, an ORS order, a line in the safety calendar. That is activity. What a post-incident inquiry asks about is exposure: which sites, which tasks, what the conditions were, what the employer knew, and what changed when the forecast turned.

The duty arrived in November. The number has not. Whoever writes a protocol first is writing the standard the rest will be judged against.

How can employers meet the heat duty with systems they already run?

The fix is the compliance system you already run, pointed at heat.

Start with the hazard register section 6 already makes you keep. Put heat in it, site by site and task by task, and measure it with wet-bulb globe temperature, not just the air temperature on the day's forecast. Humidity is what turns a hot afternoon in Chennai into a dangerous one, and the dry-bulb number misses it.

Tie actions to triggers you do not have to invent. IMD heatwave warnings and the colour codes in your state or city heat action plan already exist. Write down what changes at each level: shift timing, rest-shade-water cycles, reduced loads, and acclimatisation for new workers and anyone returning after time away.

Turn the imminent-danger right into a designed channel instead of a complaint route. Tell workers in their own language that they can stop and report heat danger, that the report goes on record, and that stopping costs them nothing. Piece-rate and daily-wage workers keep working through heat because pausing costs a day's income. A protocol that ignores that will not get used.

Use the annual health examination you already owe workers above 40. Your occupational physician can advise on markers relevant to heat strain, so the baseline exists before the season rather than after an admission.

Then check the part almost every heat plan skips: whether care is reachable during the heat itself. When a worker goes down at 2pm, how many minutes to first aid, and to a facility that is open? Protection that exists on paper and does not arrive in time has not been provided. That is the whole argument this practice is built on, set out in full in climate change is a healthcare story.

Contractors belong inside all of this. The section 6(2) duties apply to building and construction work, and BRSR's safety-incident disclosure explicitly covers the contract workforce.

How does heat protection connect to BRSR employee-wellbeing disclosure?

For India's top 1,000 listed companies, the heat duty already has a reporting surface. Principle 3 of the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report asks for spending on measures towards the well-being of employees and workers as a percentage of total revenue, and for safety-related incidents including the contract workforce. Both sit inside BRSR Core.

The timing matters. BRSR Core assessment or assurance reaches the full top 1,000 in FY 2026-27, the year that began on 1 April 2026, after SEBI's circular of 28 March 2025 let companies choose a third-party assessment or an independent assurance engagement. A heat protocol that is costed, logged and tied to incident records becomes spend and data an assessor can test, which is the same evidence test a group headquarters applies when it sends down a mandate, covered in head office has a climate-health mandate. A hydration drive with no records is neither. Our regulations and standards library sets out what each disclosure rule asks for.

The practical step is small. Record heat events as safety incidents when they meet your incident definition, so they appear in the numbers instead of disappearing into sick leave.

Where this is headed

Worker unions have put written submissions to government asking for heat protections in the labour codes, and the power to grant them already sits in section 23. When the Centre does prescribe, it will write from what practice already looks like. Employers who documented a protocol will find the rule close to what they run. Employers who did not will inherit a number, with a season to meet it.

The duty already exists. The number does not. Write your own before March, while it is cool enough to think.

Abhijith Magal

Founder, Syntropy Earth. Nine years across two global pharmaceutical multinationals in patient access and commercial roles, with health-equity work alongside the WHO-Foundation and UNICEF. He works on climate-access: where climate disruption breaks the link between patients and care.

This page describes the law as published. It is not legal advice, and decisions on your own establishments should be taken with counsel.

Last updated: 20 September 2026