This post presents our monthly curation of developments in the policy landscape – highlighting I4I content pertaining to extreme heat predictions for Indian summer and the environmental impacts of coping via air conditioning, making cities climate-smart, and identifying the country’s poor. 

It’s a scorcher

Early in April, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast above-normal temperatures in most parts of the country through the summer months in 2025. While India typically experiences 4-7 heatwave days during April-June, several regions are expected to record 2-4 additional days of extreme heat. 

In her I4I blog, Eshita Gupta puts forth, “in the short run, during summer, people may adapt by using existing cooling equipment more intensively on a hot day while, in the long run, they may choose to buy an air conditioner to mitigate expected reduction in comfort due to changed climate.” Examining data for 28 states for the period 2005-2009, she finds that a 1⁰C increase in summer temperature leads to a rise in expected daily electricity demand by 1.5% on account of greater usage of cooling equipment. Moreover, income growth and lifestyles are likely to play a significant role in the sensitivity of electricity demand to climate conditions. 

As noted by Ingmar Schumacher, the need to consider adaptation measures – in the face of limited mitigation efforts – has been endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, he argues that it does not make sense to invest in adaptation from a global perspective since adaptation is a private good while mitigation is a public good. He estimates that if everyone on the planet spends €100 on adaption, the total would far exceed the expected costs of meeting emissions reduction targets under the Paris Accord. Further, he cautions against a “vicious circle of increased adaptation” whereby a rise in emissions (due to greater use of air conditioning) would expand the need for adaptation, and at escalating costs

Mission ends, are cities smarter?

Launched in June 2015, the Smart Cities Mission aimed to improve the quality of life in 100 selected cities. With the programme coming to an end recently, there is a lot of public discourse on what it did and did not achieve. As per a report of the State Bank of India, over 90% of the total number of projects have been completed, with about half of the funding going to mobility and water and sanitation. However, this headline figure masksregionalinequities: the three major states of Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra together accounted for one-third of the funds.

Among the three key thrusts of the Mission is to promote cities with a clean and sustainable environment, which warrants greater attention. In their I4I blog, Downes and Shah point out that while per capita emissions in global cities are significantly lower than the national average, large Indian cities like Delhi and Kolkata emit up to double the national average. Further, even smaller cities in the country are figuring in lists of the most polluted cities globally. As per the authors, “the nature of India’s urbanisation could impede its efforts to decarbonise” and “cities hold the levers for change”. They recommend measures such as better regulation of building plans, empowering local governments, and providing municipalities with technical skills. 

World Bank report on poverty decline in India – but how many can afford khichdi?

The World Bank’s India Poverty and Equity Brief: April 2025 states that India has significantly reduced poverty over the last decade (2011-12 to 2022-23), with extreme poverty (living on less than US$2.15 per day) falling from 16.2% to 2.3%. The rural-urban gap in extreme poverty reduced from 7.7 to 1.7 percentage points. The report does acknowledge that changes in questionnaire design, survey implementation, and sampling in the 2022-23 round of the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES), while representing improvements, makes it challenging to make comparisons over time.   

Writing in I4I, following the release of the 2022-23 CES (Factsheet), Ghatak and Kumar observe that the consensus among researchers is that extreme poverty is India is less than 5% – as per one estimate based on the Tendulkar Poverty Line (India’s last national poverty line), the figure is 2.99%. They argue that if poverty did decline so significantly, it has done so in the absence of commensurate changes in macro-correlates of poverty such as the state of wages in the labour market. In their view, a potential explanation is what they call “accidental welfarism”: the urgent measures taken by the government during the pandemic were hard to roll back later on, allowing the poor to increase their spending. 

Further, they highlight a fundamental shortcoming of all poverty estimates, which is that they are not based on an appropriately defined poverty line. They explain that the traditional way of determining the poverty line is to estimate the price of a food basket that a person needs to consume to get the amount of energy (calories) necessary to live and function. In India, this was set in 2011-12 based on the household expenditure survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation and inflated using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for later years. Against this backdrop, Ghatak and Kumar estimate the bare minimum cost of a simple meal of khichdi and demonstrate that it is not covered by the inflated poverty line. As per their calculations, at least 10% of the population cannot afford 1,800 calories per day.

They contend that the next round of poverty debates will revolve around the determination of a new poverty line, which reflects the present-day minimum living standards of Indians. 

In case you missed it: Do read the recent blog by I4I Editor-in-Chief Parikshit Ghosh on the steep tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, and how India should tap into the strengths of its domestic markets to prepare for a potential global recession