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April 19, 2026
By Dr. Fr. John Singarayar
(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, where summer temperatures now regularly breach 45 degrees Celsius.
The health consequences extend well beyond heat. Shifting rainfall patterns and warmer standing water have expanded the range and intensity of vector-borne diseases.
Dengue, once concentrated in specific urban pockets, now appears in districts that had little familiarity with it. Malaria persists stubbornly in regions where public health systems assumed it was retreating.
As flood cycles grow more unpredictable, waterborne diseases follow — cholera, typhoid, and leptospirosis spread through communities whose drainage and sanitation infrastructure were never designed for the volumes of water now arriving.
The 2023 floods in Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim were not simply weather events; they were public health crises that overwhelmed local hospitals and contaminated water sources for weeks.
Food security, which underpins everything else, is under quiet but serious pressure. India still carries one of the world’s highest burdens of child malnutrition, and climate disruption makes that burden harder to reduce. Erratic monsoons undermine staple crop yields. Coastal fishing communities along the shores of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Odisha are watching catches shrink as ocean temperatures rise and fish populations migrate or decline.
When nutrition falters, immunity weakens, and communities already living on the margins become more vulnerable to every other health threat the warming climate produces.
It is the tribal communities, the original inhabitants, and the rural poor who face the sharpest edge of all this. They contribute least to the emissions driving climate change, yet they live closest to the ecosystems being disrupted — forests, rivers, wetlands, and coasts whose stability their health and livelihoods depend on entirely.
When forests are cleared for mining or large infrastructure, when rivers are dammed without adequate consideration of downstream communities, the consequences land not in boardrooms but in bodies. Children go undernourished. Women walk further for water. Men seek work in cities that are themselves overheating.
Pope Francis captured this moral dimension precisely in Laudato Si’ when he wrote that the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor rise as one.
In India, that is not a metaphor. It is visible in the displacement of Indigenous families from forest land, in the saltwater seeping into the wells of Sundarbans villages as sea levels inch upward, and in the farmers of Vidarbha caught between debt and drought.
The encyclical’s concept of integral ecology — the insistence that environmental health and human health cannot be treated as separate concerns — resonates with particular force in a country where so many lives are woven directly into the fabric of the natural world.
Mental health, still insufficiently acknowledged in India’s public health conversation, adds another layer. Farmers who have lost multiple harvests carry a grief and anxiety that does not lift with the next season.
Communities repeatedly displaced by cyclones or floods lose not just property but the psychological ground of home and continuity. Young people in cities and villages alike speak of an unease about their futures that goes beyond ordinary worry.
Eco-anxiety is real, and in India, it is entangled with economic precarity in ways that make it especially difficult to absorb.
None of this is without possibility. India has shown, in solar energy expansion, in community watershed programs, and in mangrove restoration along vulnerable coastlines, that it can act with both ambition and local intelligence.
The question is whether climate action is understood and pursued as a health imperative, not merely an environmental or economic one.
Policies that reduce air pollution protect lungs. Investments in drought-resistant crops reduce malnutrition. Urban greening cools cities and improves mental well-being. These are not separate agendas. They are the same agenda.
India’s climate story is global in its causes and intensely local in its consequences. It is felt in the body of a child coughing through a haze-thickened night and in the hands of a farmer reading a sky that no longer speaks the same language.
The people least responsible for this crisis are absorbing its worst effects with the fewest resources to recover. Responding to that reality with the urgency it demands is not only a matter of smart policy. It is a matter of justice, and on that count, the world still has a great deal to answer for.
By Dr. Fr. John Singarayar
(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, where summer temperatures now regularly breach 45 degrees Celsius.
The health consequences extend well beyond heat. Shifting rainfall patterns and warmer standing water have expanded the range and intensity of vector-borne diseases.
Dengue, once concentrated in specific urban pockets, now appears in districts that had little familiarity with it. Malaria persists stubbornly in regions where public health systems assumed it was retreating.
As flood cycles grow more unpredictable, waterborne diseases follow — cholera, typhoid, and leptospirosis spread through communities whose drainage and sanitation infrastructure were never designed for the volumes of water now arriving.
The 2023 floods in Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim were not simply weather events; they were public health crises that overwhelmed local hospitals and contaminated water sources for weeks.
Food security, which underpins everything else, is under quiet but serious pressure. India still carries one of the world’s highest burdens of child malnutrition, and climate disruption makes that burden harder to reduce. Erratic monsoons undermine staple crop yields. Coastal fishing communities along the shores of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Odisha are watching catches shrink as ocean temperatures rise and fish populations migrate or decline.
When nutrition falters, immunity weakens, and communities already living on the margins become more vulnerable to every other health threat the warming climate produces.
It is the tribal communities, the original inhabitants, and the rural poor who face the sharpest edge of all this. They contribute least to the emissions driving climate change, yet they live closest to the ecosystems being disrupted — forests, rivers, wetlands, and coasts whose stability their health and livelihoods depend on entirely.
When forests are cleared for mining or large infrastructure, when rivers are dammed without adequate consideration of downstream communities, the consequences land not in boardrooms but in bodies. Children go undernourished. Women walk further for water. Men seek work in cities that are themselves overheating.
Pope Francis captured this moral dimension precisely in Laudato Si’ when he wrote that the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor rise as one.
In India, that is not a metaphor. It is visible in the displacement of Indigenous families from forest land, in the saltwater seeping into the wells of Sundarbans villages as sea levels inch upward, and in the farmers of Vidarbha caught between debt and drought.
The encyclical’s concept of integral ecology — the insistence that environmental health and human health cannot be treated as separate concerns — resonates with particular force in a country where so many lives are woven directly into the fabric of the natural world.
Mental health, still insufficiently acknowledged in India’s public health conversation, adds another layer. Farmers who have lost multiple harvests carry a grief and anxiety that does not lift with the next season.
Communities repeatedly displaced by cyclones or floods lose not just property but the psychological ground of home and continuity. Young people in cities and villages alike speak of an unease about their futures that goes beyond ordinary worry.
Eco-anxiety is real, and in India, it is entangled with economic precarity in ways that make it especially difficult to absorb.
None of this is without possibility. India has shown, in solar energy expansion, in community watershed programs, and in mangrove restoration along vulnerable coastlines, that it can act with both ambition and local intelligence.
The question is whether climate action is understood and pursued as a health imperative, not merely an environmental or economic one.
Policies that reduce air pollution protect lungs. Investments in drought-resistant crops reduce malnutrition. Urban greening cools cities and improves mental well-being. These are not separate agendas. They are the same agenda.
India’s climate story is global in its causes and intensely local in its consequences. It is felt in the body of a child coughing through a haze-thickened night and in the hands of a farmer reading a sky that no longer speaks the same language.
The people least responsible for this crisis are absorbing its worst effects with the fewest resources to recover. Responding to that reality with the urgency it demands is not only a matter of smart policy. It is a matter of justice, and on that count, the world still has a great deal to answer for.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
Dr. Fr. John Singarayar
Dr. Fr. John Singarayar, SVD, is a member of the Society of the Divine Word, India Mumbai Province, and holds a doctorate in Anthropology. He is the author of seven books and a regular contributor to academic conferences and scholarly publications in the fields of sociology, anthropology, tribal studies, spirituality, and mission studies. He currently serves at the Community and Human Resources Development Centre in Tala, Maharashtra.
Dr. Fr. John Singarayar
Dr. Fr. John Singarayar, SVD, is a member of the Society of the Divine Word, India Mumbai Province, and holds a doctorate in Anthropology. He is the author of seven books and a regular contributor to academic conferences and scholarly publications in the fields of sociology, anthropology, tribal studies, spirituality, and mission studies. He currently serves at the Community and Human Resources Development Centre in Tala, Maharashtra.
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