On the Edit Page of The Economic Times this week, a short piece carried a warning bigger than its length suggested. Titled “This Hotspot Is Getting Hazardous,” it reported that India’s exposure to extreme, hazardous humid heat, measured through the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), has risen nineteen-fold since the 1950s, faster than almost anywhere else on the planet. By 2030, the piece estimated, close to 4.5 percent of India’s GDP could be at risk because of this single factor.

For an agritech company that spends most of its working hours thinking about fodder, cattle sheds and rural incomes, this is not an abstract climate statistic sitting in a newspaper column. It is a description of the operating environment our farmers work in every day. The workday that gets cut short by heat, the wage that does not get paid, and the milk yield that quietly drops through July and August are three faces of the same problem, and they meet on India’s dairy farms with unusual force. This piece looks at what the new data actually says, why India is registering the sharpest increase globally, who bears the cost first, and what a different way of growing fodder can change about that equation.

The Economic Times piece drew on a new study attributed to the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and Gauhati University, which tracked how many productive workdays humid heat stress has cost Indian workers since the 1950s. Globally, population exposure to hazardous humid heat, defined as WBGT above 33°C, has increased roughly sixteen-fold between the 1950s and the 2020s. India’s own exposure has grown even faster, at close to nineteen times, making the country a global hotspot on this specific measure.

That last figure is not a one-off estimate. It sits at the upper end of a range, 2.5 to 4.5 percent of GDP by 2030, first modelled by the McKinsey Global Institute in its 2020 study on heat and work in India. That report also found that heat-exposed work already produces roughly half of India’s GDP, drives close to a third of GDP growth, and employs about 380 million people, three-quarters of the country’s labour force.[2] Two independent estimates, five years apart, converging on nearly the same number is a signal worth taking seriously.

Wet bulb globe temperature matters more than ordinary air temperature because it accounts for humidity, wind and radiant heat alongside heat itself. It is a proxy for how well the human body can still cool itself through sweat. Beyond a certain WBGT threshold, sweating stops being an effective cooling mechanism no matter how much water a person drinks or how much shade is available. This is why a humid 38°C afternoon in the Indo-Gangetic plain can be more physiologically dangerous than a dry 42°C day in a desert region.

The Economic Times piece was careful to note that unchecked greenhouse gas emissions are not the only driver here. Poor urban planning, congestion and the loss of tree canopy and water bodies to unplanned, concretised construction have converted many Indian cities and towns into heat traps in their own right.

Rural India is not shielded from this trend. Groundwater depletion, shrinking common grazing land and the steady conversion of tree cover to farmland or built-up area produce a similar, if less studied, local warming effect around villages and small towns, precisely the geography where most of India’s dairy farming happens.

Aggregate numbers like GDP-at-risk can feel distant until they are traced back to individual working days. A 2026 study in Scientific Reports measured WBGT directly at outdoor worksites in southern India and found readings as high as 35°C, with 88 percent of workers exposed above safe thresholds during summer months. Sixty-one percent of workers reported losing productivity in summer compared with 39 percent in winter, and roughly 15 percent reported losing daily wages outright during summer, against 9.3 percent in winter.[4]

A separate 2025 study in Nature Communications tracking heat stress exposure across India from 1981 to 2023 found that this burden is not distributed evenly. Marginalised groups, including Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, face disproportionately higher outdoor occupational heat exposure than other groups, meaning the households with the least financial cushion are also the ones absorbing the sharpest wage losses.[5]

None of this is confined to construction sites or city streets. India’s 380 million heat-exposed workers include a very large share of the rural workforce, and a meaningful part of that workforce spends its mornings cutting, carrying and feeding green fodder to cattle and buffalo, often during exactly the hours when WBGT peaks.

Dairy farming in India is overwhelmingly an informal, household-level activity, and it leans heavily on women’s labour. According to the National Dairy Development Board, women contribute more than 70 percent of the labour in India’s dairy sector, and fieldwork consistently shows that daily fodder collection and animal care fall disproportionately on them.[6] That places a very large number of women squarely inside the same hazardous WBGT windows the new heat-stress data describes, often without the option of shifting the work to cooler hours, because cattle still need to be fed twice a day, every day, regardless of the temperature outside.

The second exposure is on the animal side. Heat and humidity suppress feed intake in cattle and buffalo, and lower feed intake translates directly into lower milk yield during the exact months when farmers most need income stability. A 2024 survey by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, covering more than 7,300 cattle-rearing households across 15 states, found that 12 to 14 percent of cattle rearers reported declining milk output linked to rising temperatures, while over 70 percent reported difficulty accessing affordable, good-quality feed.[7]

This is the specific problem Shunya Agritech was built to work on. Instead of green fodder being grown on open, rain-fed fields and cut by hand in whatever weather the day brings, our model grows it hydroponically inside climate-controlled units, close to where farmers live. The growing environment, not the outdoor climate, sets the conditions for the crop. That single change breaks both halves of the compounding problem described above.

Consistent, easily digestible feed matters most precisely when animals are heat-stressed and eating less, because every mouthful needs to carry more nutrition. This is also where the rest of Shunya’s system does its work. Feed Right balances rations for the animal in front of it rather than a generic formula, Herd Intel gives farmers visibility into how individual animals are actually responding through a heatwave, and the Production OS keeps the growing units running to a standard, so that quality does not drift from one production partner to the next. The Fresh Grid network is what makes this local: distributed micro-production close to farming communities, rather than a centralised model that adds transport time and cost on top of everything else. Across the herds we currently support, farmers report a 10-15 percent yield increase, evidence that reliability itself, not just nutrient content, is what protects income when the weather does not cooperate.

India is registering the sharpest rise in hazardous humid heat exposure on record, but the physics behind that number is not unique to India. Wet bulb heat rises fastest in tropical, humid, densely populated regions, precisely the geography shared by much of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Many of these regions are also home to large, fast-growing, smallholder-driven dairy and livestock economies that depend on the same rain-fed, open-field fodder systems India is now being forced to rethink.

We think of Shunya as an Indian company solving a problem that will not stay Indian for long. A distributed, climate-controlled production model, built to work at village scale rather than requiring large capital-intensive farms, is a template that travels well to any tropical geography where livestock keepers face the same combination of rising heat, shrinking grazing land and unreliable rainfall. Building that model well at home is also how it gets built well for the rest of the world.

Heat advisories, adjusted work hours and shaded rest areas are useful, necessary interventions, and they belong in any serious response to this data. But they treat humid heat as a temporary emergency to be managed each summer rather than a structural shift that has already happened. The Economic Times piece was direct about this: tackling humid heat stress needs to move up the policy and political priority ladder, with measures that protect human health and productivity built in as standard, not bolted on after the fact.

For India’s dairy economy specifically, that means treating fodder production itself as infrastructure that needs to be engineered for a hotter, more humid climate, in the same way that power grids and water systems are being redesigned for climate resilience. Moving fodder cultivation from open fields into controlled environments will not lower the WBGT reading outside. It will change how much that reading is allowed to cost a farming household, in lost labour hours, in lost milk, and in income that no longer has to disappear every time the mercury climbs. That is what moving from scarcity to abundance looks like on the ground: not wishing the heat away, but engineering around it, systematically, at the scale the problem actually demands.