Faith-based organizations in India have demonstrated, particularly in recent years, an ability to continue delivering relief in contexts where formal institutional mechanisms have weakened or withdrawn — a quality that climate adaptation specialists are beginning to recognize.
The significance of this is not simply operational. What religious institutions offer that government cooling centers often cannot is trust. For migrant workers in an unfamiliar city, a gurdwara or mosque operates as a known quantity — a place where they will not be turned away, asked for documents, or looked at with suspicion. For the elderly, isolated in poorly ventilated homes in narrow lanes, a temple is a social anchor as much as a physical one.
India among one of the hottest on the planet
India is one of the most heat-vulnerable countries on earth. Nineteen of the world’s 20 hottest cities are now located in India and the India Meteorological Department has warned that many parts of the country experienced intense heatwaves between April and June 2026, with temperatures in several regions reaching 100 to 106 degrees. The threat is not abstract.
A study published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Health estimates that a single hot day causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally in India, and that a five-day heatwave is linked to nearly 30,000 extra deaths.
Despite this large scale, heatwave mortality remains under-reported, poorly tracked, and largely absent as a target for preventive actions — and heatwaves are not yet classified as a notified national disaster under India’s Disaster Management Act, limiting the flow of central relief funds.
Roughly three-quarters of India’s workforce — about 380 million people — work in heat-exposed sectors, including agriculture and construction. For these workers, extreme heat silently worsens heart and respiratory illnesses, damages kidneys and causes dehydration and heatstroke — yet it rarely leaves visible destruction, and receives far less attention than floods or cyclones. Outdoor workers are also the people less likely to have access to air conditioning: only around 30% of Indian households can afford either air conditioners or coolers.
Into this gap, religious institutions have stepped — though often without framing what they do as climate response at all.
In Sikhism, the concept of seva — selfless service — and the institution of the langar (free community kitchens) have for centuries made gurdwaras natural centers of material relief. Volunteer-operated langars serve meals to all free of charge, regardless of religion, caste, gender, economic status or ethnicity.
During the pandemic, gurdwaras worldwide demonstrated their capacity to surge rapidly into emergency relief: in New Delhi, volunteers introduced an “oxygen langar” to provide free oxygen tanks to individuals suffering from low blood oxygen. This summer, many gurdwaras in northern India are running extended service hours, distributing chilled water and oral rehydration salts, and keeping their cool marble halls open as unofficial rest spaces through the hottest hours of the day.
Houses of worship step in
Jasbir Singh, a member of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, says the response has grown more organized as the summers have grown more punishing. “Every year we distribute water, food, and energy drinks to daily-wage workers and gig workers,” he told Religion Unplugged. “But as temperatures keep rising, we felt we had to do more.”
This year, the committee set up temporary shelters for outdoor workers during peak afternoon hours — and kept the gurdwara’s health facilities on standby for anyone showing signs of heatstroke.
Hindu temples, particularly those with large acreage and significant foot traffic, have a parallel tradition. The pyaau — a roadside water kiosk, often set up by temples or devout individuals during peak summer — is among the oldest forms of informal heat relief in India, common across places like Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Many temples now organize these as coordinated efforts, deploying volunteers to busy intersections, bus depots, and construction sites where outdoor workers congregate.
A few miles away, at Shri Digambar Jain Lal Mandir in the heart of Old Delhi — one of the city’s oldest and densest neighborhoods, where daily-wage laborers crowd the narrow lanes around Chandni Chowk — the scene during peak afternoon hours tells its own story. With temperatures approaching 113 degrees Fahrenheit, close to 50 people had taken shelter within the temple’s premises.
Volunteers there had set up fans and coolers to cut through the heat. Earthen pots and dispensers lined the entrance, offering chilled water to anyone passing through. For workers with nowhere to retreat during the most dangerous hours of the day, the temple had become, in effect, an informal cooling center.
Mosques have similarly extended their role. Across northern and central India, where afternoon temperatures make midday outdoor work life-threatening, mosque courtyards — traditionally designed for cross-ventilation, with shaded colonnades and water for ablution — have become de facto cooling spaces.
During Ramadan in recent years, community mobilization around iftar distribution has given mosque committees existing infrastructure for large-scale food and water operations that can be adapted outside the religious calendar.
Churches — particularly Catholic and Protestant congregations in urban centers — have also been quietly active. In cities like Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad, where June temperatures can exceed 104 degrees with high humidity, parish halls have been converted into cooling shelters, and church-linked NGOs have been distributing electrolyte drink mix and running heat-awareness campaigns in informal settlements.
Surviving the heat
Successful heat response programs, such as Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan, have demonstrated that early warnings, targeted outreach, and medical preparedness can reduce excess deaths by up to 27%.
However, these programs work best when they are embedded in community networks that already have the trust and reach that formal institutions often lack. Increasingly, climate adaptation researchers and urban planners are asking whether faith institutions could be formally integrated into city-level heat response plans — not as charity actors, but as structural partners.
Iyad Abumoghli, Director of the Faith for Earth Initiative at the United Nations Environment Program, has noted that “faith communities — motivated by spiritual values and driven by an ethical responsibility — wield enormous social and political influence” in driving community-level action.
Researchers working on India’s heat crisis have increasingly noted that formal Heat Action Plans, while improving, still struggle to reach the most marginalized — a gap that community institutions, including religious ones, are quietly filling
This constitutes a genuine shift — whether religious institutions are consciously repositioning themselves as climate actors — or whether it is simply the continuation of ancient charitable practice in new conditions is unclear.
What is clear is that as India’s summers grow longer, hotter and more lethal, the institutions that people turn to in crisis are not always the ones that appear in policy documents. Sometimes they are the ones with open gates, cold water and no questions asked.
