India is warming faster than the global average – what it means for every state

In 2024, India logged its warmest year since nationwide records began in 1901. The thermometer averaged 0.65 degrees Celsius above the long-term baseline, and the decade from 2015 to 2024 was the hottest ten-year stretch the country has ever recorded. Those are the national headlines. The state-level picture is sharper, more uneven, and in places considerably more urgent.

What happened to the temperature and why the headline number understates it

The headline number – and what it hides

January 2025 was India’s second-warmest January on record. February 2025 was the warmest February ever measured. By the second week of March, temperatures across parts of Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Odisha had already cleared 40 degrees Celsius. In much of central and northwest India, spring simply did not happen this year. The hot season arrived in February and stayed.

These are not random spikes. The India Meteorological Department confirms that the average land surface air temperature has risen by approximately 0.65 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 baseline, and by around 1.2 degrees Celsius compared to 1901-1910 levels. The country is about 1.2 degrees warmer now than at the start of the 20th century, and the acceleration since the early 1980s has been clear in the data.

The global average for 2024 was 1.55 degrees above pre-industrial levels – noticeably higher than India’s figure. That gap is real, but it needs context. India’s tropical location, the moderating effect of the monsoon, and the specific baselines used for comparison all compress the measured warming relative to global averages. The regional story, which the national average cannot show, is considerably more alarming.

There is one figure buried in the IMD data that deserves more attention than it gets: minimum temperatures – the overnight lows – have risen faster than maximum temperatures. Night-time lows are up 0.97 degrees Celsius since 1901; daytime highs are up 0.88 degrees. The practical consequence is that the body has less time to recover. Hot days are dangerous. Consecutive hot nights, with no overnight cooling, are what kill people.

The national picture in numbers

India experienced extreme weather events on 322 of 365 days in 2024 – across cyclones, floods, heatwaves, and drought events. That figure comes from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s 2025 survey of 19,000 Indians. Almost every month of that year, somewhere in the country, something was happening that had not happened before, or something familiar that arrived earlier and harder. The table below sets out the key national-level temperature data.

What warming looks like state by state

The CEEW (Council on Energy, Environment and Water) 2025 heat risk study ranks India’s ten highest heat risk states and union territories as Delhi, Maharashtra, Goa, Kerala, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. The ranking weighs hazard (temperature, humidity, heat duration), exposure (population, economic activity), and vulnerability (income, health, access to cooling). Temperature alone does not tell the story; what matters is what happens to actual people when the heat rises.

The warm nights problem – harder to see, more dangerous than the hot days

Nearly 70 per cent of India’s districts experienced five or more additional very warm nights per summer between 2012 and 2022, compared to the previous three decades. Only around 28 per cent of districts saw a similar increase in very hot days. That asymmetry matters enormously, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves.

The body cools down at night. After a day of heat exposure, the overnight drop in temperature allows core body temperature to normalise, cardiovascular stress to ease, and the kidneys and brain to recover. When nights stay hot, that recovery is incomplete. The accumulated physiological load across several consecutive nights of insufficient cooling is what drives cardiac arrest in elderly people, organ failure in outdoor labourers, and dangerous dehydration in children. It is not the single-day record that kills; it is the stretch.

The rise in warm nights is sharpest in the densely populated districts around Tier I and Tier II cities. Mumbai logged 15 more warm nights per summer in the decade to 2022 than in the previous three decades. Bengaluru recorded 11 extra. Bhopal and Jaipur added 7 each; Delhi 6; Chennai 4. These cities hold tens of millions of residents, many in informal settlements – no insulation, no air conditioning, concrete walls that absorb heat through the day and radiate it through the night. Urban heat islands push the effective overnight temperature 3 to 5 degrees above the surrounding countryside. For a family sleeping in a 35-degree room at midnight, the official station reading is not the temperature they are experiencing.

The Indian landmass was warmer on average by nearly 0.9 degrees Celsius during the previous decade compared to the early 20th century. Warming has been uneven, with parts of north India warming as fast as 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade in the past three decades. – State of Environment, India 2026 – Down to Earth

What the warming costs – not the projections, the present

During fieldwork in Vidarbha in 2023, the ClimateVarsity team spent time with a cotton farmer named Vasantrao. He sows in June when the monsoon arrives, harvests in October before the post-monsoon heat. His borewell, which was 80 feet deep when his father drilled it, now sits at 240 feet. Pumping costs have tripled. A bollworm species he had never encountered ten years ago has arrived on his crop, moving northward and eastward as temperatures have shifted its viable range.

He had never heard the phrase “climate change.” He had registered every one of its consequences.

That gap – between living inside a climate crisis and having the language or knowledge to understand what is causing it – is the gap ClimateVarsity works in. But the material costs of that gap are worth being specific about. The 0.65 degree national average registers in Vasantrao’s world as: a borewell that is three times deeper than his father’s. A pest he does not recognise. Power bills that eat into his margin before he has sold a single bale. School classrooms that hit 40 degrees by mid-morning. And in the 2024 general election, 33 poll workers died of heat exhaustion across India’s northern states – people doing a day’s work in conditions that should have required mandatory cooling breaks.

The CEEW heat stress projection for 2030 – a 4.5 per cent GDP loss, equivalent to 35 million full-time jobs – is mostly about outdoor workers. Agricultural labourers, construction crews, delivery riders, street vendors. When the heat exceeds safe physiological thresholds, these workers stop. When they stop, they do not earn. When they do not earn, the household does not eat. The warming is not an abstract economic variable. It is a direct constraint on the livelihoods of India’s largest working population.

What 96% of Indians know – and what remains missing

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication surveyed over 19,000 Indians between 2022 and 2025. Ninety-six per cent said global warming is happening, and no district surveyed fell below 90 per cent. That is a striking baseline of climate awareness for a country as diverse as India.

The knowledge drops off quickly beyond that. Only 41 per cent say they know a lot or something about global warming – ranging from 27 per cent in West Bengal to 52 per cent in Gujarat. Knowledge about specific adaptive responses – what to do, where to seek help, which local actions are available – is lower still across most of the country.

Rajasthan is an instructive case. More than 75 per cent of residents say they have personally experienced severe heat waves – the highest proportion of any surveyed state. Knowledge about global warming registers at 51 per cent. But specific knowledge about available responses – johad-based aquifer recharge, heat-resilient crop varieties, community-based early warning, state heat action plans – is patchier and inconsistently distributed. People know something is badly wrong. Many do not have the specific information to do anything different because of it.

This is the gap ClimateVarsity addresses. Not the awareness gap – communities across India are experiencing climate impacts directly and know it. The knowledge-to-action gap. The distance between registering that the well is deeper, the bollworm has arrived, and the heatwave lasted three weeks longer than before – and understanding what those things mean, why they are connected, and what concrete responses exist.

The warming is not uniform across India, and neither are the responses available. In Rajasthan, connecting the temperature trajectory to the groundwater trajectory changes the calculus of adaptation. In coastal Odisha, connecting cyclone frequency data to traditional early warning practices helps communities act on knowledge they already carry. In the Western Ghats, making the link between the rejected Gadgil Committee recommendations and the intensifying landslide season gives communities the context to push for different policy choices. Localised, relevant, actionable knowledge is what shifts communities from aware to adaptive.

India in 2024 experienced extreme weather events on 322 of 365 days. Nearly every region of the country saw something it had not seen before, or something familiar arriving earlier, harder, or longer than it used to. – Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 2025

A number that should change the conversation

The global average warming in 2024 was 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. India’s long-term rise is around 1.2 degrees above the 1901 baseline. That gap is frequently cited to suggest India’s climate situation is less urgent than the global picture suggests.

Three things are wrong with that reading. First, India’s measured warming is compressed by geography and monsoon dynamics – the regional extremes the national average conceals are severe. Second, the national figure hides the specifics: parts of north India warming at 0.2 degrees per decade, coastal zones facing compounding sea level and cyclone risk, the Himalayas losing ice at accelerating rates. Third, and most directly: India has 1.4 billion people. A 0.65 degree average anomaly distributed across a population of that size – most of them outdoor workers, smallholder farmers, or urban informal residents without cooling access – is a major climate event, not a moderate one.

Vasantrao in Vidarbha has no use for the national temperature anomaly. He needs to understand why his borewell is three times deeper than his father’s, why the bollworm arrived when it did, and what choices exist for a cotton farmer on a warming, drying Deccan plateau. The answer to those questions is a climate literacy question. It is also, at this point, a question of livelihood and survival.