A Climate Standard For India’s Group Homes For Persons With Intellectual Disabilities

Authored by Gyan Prakash Kesharwani, an Advocate and a Doctoral candidate at NLIU, Bhopal.

Climate Resilience in Group Homes for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities | Source

Edited by Tanya Verma, Core Team Member

The idea on which India’s system for the long-term care of adults with intellectual disabilities is based is one that can no longer be considered safe: that the physical environment in which care is given will stay generally stable. The National Trust Act of 1999 established residential schemes, including Gharaunda and Samarth, through which registered organisations provide lifelong shelter and support to adults with autism, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, or multiple disabilities. These schemes were created to meet a particular concern of ageing parents, namely the question of what will happen to them after they have died. They were not intended to deal with the problem that arises during a heatwave, and the standards that apply to them show this failure to address the issue. That gap is not merely an administrative one. It also raises a constitutional question. If Article 21’s guarantee of life and personal liberty is understood to include a life of dignity and protection from foreseeable threats to basic health and safety, then the conditions in which people placed in institutional care live cannot be treated as a matter of infrastructure alone. Article 14’s guarantee of equality is equally relevant: treating disability as a priority in principle, while leaving the residential environments of some of the most vulnerable people without basic heat protections, risks producing a form of substantive inequality.

The fact that this omission has a measurable cost has become much clearer. In April 2025, Nature Communications published an analysis based on 16 years of Korean national health insurance claims data, covering 584,743 emergency admissions among people with disabilities. This analysis showed that individuals with disabilities had a heat-related hospitalisation risk about one third higher than that of the non-disabled population. More importantly from a policy point of view, the effect differed according to the type of disability and was most evident in the case of people with an intellectual disability. Although the finding is of less relevance as a mortality figure and more as a diagnostic one, it does identify the group for whom standard heat health measures are most likely to be ineffective.

The causes are in part physiological since impaired thermoregulation, common associated conditions and psychotropic drugs which interfere with the ability to lose heat all increase a person’s basic vulnerability. However, the more important factors are informational. Public heat warnings are based on a series of assumptions: that a person will detect an increasing level of physiological discomfort, interpret that discomfort as a threat and then communicate or take action in response. In a large number of adults with an intellectual disability, this chain of events fails at the first or second stage. Discomfort may instead appear as agitation, self-harm or a regression in adaptive skills, all of which are forms of behaviour that an untrained observer is not likely to recognise as signs of heat illness. Public health measures based on such advisories are therefore poorly suited to this group.

The Gharaunda guidelines state that the size of the residential batch should be twenty, that the tenure over the land, the vocational activity, and access to basic medical care should be a minimum of ten years, but they do not mention the thermal performance of the building, shaded outdoor space, backup power to deal with the night-time outages which now regularly occur during summer periods of peak demand, a minimum amount of stored water, a written heat protocol, or an evacuation procedure suitable for residents who may not respond to a conventional alarm. As a result, the facilities providing care to one of the most heat-sensitive groups in the country are operating under standards which do not refer to heat. That omission matters constitutionally because residents of these homes are not simply consumers of a welfare scheme; they are persons whose ability to protect themselves from environmental risk may depend substantially on the institution responsible for their care. The Article 21 interest in life and dignity therefore has a practical dimension here: minimum conditions of safe habitation must be capable of responding to foreseeable climate-related threats.

It is not a lack of climate policy that is the issue. In fact, more than 250 cities and districts in 23 states have introduced Heat Action Plans, and Delhi’s plan for 2025 specifically names people with disabilities as a priority group, the 2026 update going on to extend the provision of cooling shelters and water to informal settlements. The problem is the gap between simply acknowledging the needs of people with disabilities and actually directing actions towards them. This is where the constitutional principle of substantive equality becomes important. Article 14 does not require the State to treat everyone identically where their circumstances create materially different risks; it requires the State to respond meaningfully to those differences. A heat policy that identifies people with disabilities as a vulnerable group but does not translate that recognition into monitoring, emergency response and minimum standards for residential facilities risks reducing equality to a statement of intent rather than an operational obligation. At present, no Heat Action Plan keeps a record of the residential facilities where adults with intellectual disabilities live, and no district authority is required to check on their condition when an alert is issued. A study published this year in Disasters, which looked at disability-inclusive disaster management in Assam, shows the general trend: mentions of people with disabilities become fewer and fewer as one goes from national policy down to the district-level plans that actually carry out the response.

Any effective solution also has to address the problem of a lack of workers. Residential disability care is chronically understaffed and offers poor pay, and care investigations given in India repeatedly show high levels of burden, anxiety and depression among caregivers. Since heatwaves and floods increase the demands on care at a time when the number of available staff is most likely to decrease, resilience standards which suppose a stable staff roster will prove inadequate under the conditions for which they were developed.

The following measures should be taken. The National Trust should amend the Gharaunda and Samarth standards so as to include provisions for thermal safety, as well as power and water redundancy together with a documented emergency plan, and should make adherence to these standards a condition of receiving continued funding rather than merely aiming to meet them. The District Disaster Management Authorities should keep registers of residential facilities for people with an intellectual disability, on the basis of appropriate data safeguards, and should grant them the same priority status as is given to hospitals. Heat Action Plans should formally recognise both paid and unpaid caregivers as frontline responders, providing them with pre-season training and ensuring that they are included in alert notifications. In 1999 India promised to take responsibility for citizens whose families would not be able to do so indefinitely. That responsibility now has to be understood in constitutional as well as administrative terms. For people whose safety may depend on the institutions in which they live, the promise of Article 21 cannot end at providing a bed and a caregiver; it must extend to conditions of residence that protect life and dignity in a changing climate. And if equality under Article 14 is to have meaning for people with intellectual disabilities, climate resilience must become part of the minimum standard of care rather than an optional addition to it.