A man drinks water from a bottle on a hot summer day in Allahabad on April 30, 2022. SANJAY KANOJIA AFP NOIDA, India -- For Yogendra Tundre, life at a building site on the outskirts of the Indian capital New Delhi is hard enough. This year, record high temperatures are making it unbearable.
The country's vast majority of poor workers, who generally work outdoors, are vulnerable to the scorching temperatures as India struggles with an unprecedented heat wave.
There is too much heat and if we don't work, what will we eat? Tundre said that we work for a few days and then sit idle for a few days because of tiredness and heat.
The temperatures in the New Delhi area have touched 45 degrees Celsius 113 Fahrenheit this year, which often causes Tundre, and his wife Lata, who works at the same construction site to fall sick. Sometimes I don't go to work because of the heat. Many times, they fall sick from dehydration and then require intravenous fluids, Lata said, while standing outside their house, a temporary shanty with a tin roof.
Scientists say that more than a billion people in India and neighboring Pakistan are at risk from the extreme heat and that the early onset of an intense summer is linked to climate change.
India suffered its hottest March in more than 100 years and parts of the country experienced its highest temperatures on record in April.
New Delhi saw the temperature gauge above 40 degrees Celsius. Since March, more than two dozen people have died of suspected heat strokes, and power demand has hit multi-year highs.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called for measures to be drawn up by state governments to mitigate the effects of the extreme heat.
Tundre and Lata live in a slum near the construction site in Noida, a satellite city of New Delhi, with their two young children. They moved from their home state of Chhattisgarh in central India to seek work and higher wages around the capital.
On the construction site, laborers scale up walls, lay concrete and carry heavy loads, using ragged scarves around their heads as protection against the sun.
Even when the couple is busy with their day's work, they have little respite as their home is hot, having absorbed the heat of the sun all day long.
Avikal Somvanshi, an urban environment researcher from India's Centre for Science and Environment, said that heat stress was the most common cause of death after lightning, from forces of nature in the last twenty years.
Most of the deaths occur in men aged 30 -- 45. These are working class, blue-collar men who have no choice but to be working in the scorching heat, Somvanshi said.
In India, there are no laws that prevent outdoor activity when temperatures breach a certain level, unlike in some Middle-Eastern countries, according to Somvanshi.