New Delhi: The BBC is already ringing the warning bells: as an early summer looms on Indian horizons, farms and factories across the country are preparing for the worst.
February 2025 was the hottest February in 125 years, the BBC reports, and the weekly average minimum temperature was above normal levels by at least one to three degrees Celsius in many parts of the country. These temperatures are likely to persist between March and May.
“Scorching heat is also threatening winter staples such as wheat, chickpea and rapeseed,” the BBC reports. “While the country’s agriculture minister has dismissed concerns about poor yields and predicted that India will have a bumper wheat harvest this year, independent experts are less hopeful.”
If similar trends follow, India will have to heavily rely on imports—especially with rising temperatures impacting the availability of water for agriculture. As a primarily agrarian country, India is particularly vulnerable to climate change, the BBC explains—and any setback to recently rising rural consumption and farm-led recovery will affect overall growth, at a time when “urban households have been cutting back and private investment hasn’t picked up.”
Besides the obvious impact of climate change on agrarian resources, India is also expected to lose about 5.8 percent of daily working hours due to heat stress by 2030. The potential loss of income “across services, manufacturing, agriculture and construction sectors from labour capacity reduction due to extreme heat” was pegged at $159 billion in 2021—or 5.4 percent of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“Without urgent action, India risks a future where heatwaves threaten both lives and economic stability,” the BBC says.
The Financial Times issues a different warning: that India’s “tax terrorism” and red tape are hurting investment.
“Investors have long urged India to reduce red tape, relax labour laws and simplify taxation and compliance, arguing that reform, particularly of taxation, could stimulate investment and create jobs,” the Financial Times reports. “At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has wooed global investors such as Apple and wants to establish India as a global manufacturing hub to rival China, it has become a matter of pressing importance.”
Growth is forecast at just 6.5 percent for the current fiscal year, down from 9.2 percent in 2023-24. And this year’s budget took this into account by announcing a review of business rules, certifications, licences and compliances—along with establishing an index of states ranked on investment friendliness.
However, while India has generally eased “company registrations, consolidated labour codes and digitised tax processes” under Modi, foreign companies still do not see India as an easy country in which to do business.
“An unwieldy bureaucracy, characterised by overlapping offices and opaque approvals, makes change difficult,” FT reports. “A lot of it is like Yes Minister,” said a senior executive at a major Mumbai-based business conglomerate, referring to the classic British satirical show where civil servants thwart attempts at reform while senior officials “end up getting frustrated because the hydra has grown too much”.
The problem is that many businesses still see China’s centralised system as more attractive than India’s—and this perception battle is one the Indian government needs to fight.
Meanwhile, The Guardian had a strong editorial on the Modi government’s plans for delimitation, with its headline branding the attempt to redraw India’s electoral map as “deepening a dangerous north-south divide.”
“India’s north and south are worlds apart: the six largest northern states have 600 million people—twice the south’s population—but lag far behind. Tamil Nadu thrives on industry, education and social mobility, with only 6% in poverty compared with 23% in Bihar. A child in Kerala has better survival odds than in the US; in BJP-run Uttar Pradesh (UP), they’re worse than in Afghanistan,” the editorial says.
“It makes sense to redistribute resources to alleviate poverty. But UP alone receives more federal tax revenue than all five southern states combined. For southern India, delimitation represents both economic and political marginalisation—being taxed more, represented less and sidelined in national policymaking,” it adds.
Quoting papers by Paris’s Institut Montaigne think tank and Indian economist Jean Drèze, The Guardian’s editorial board writes scathingly that the deepening north-south divide is comparable to the “EU’s Greek debt crisis, where wealthier northern countries resented subsidising the poorer southern ones”. It also says that Modi’s move towards delimitation is to “lock in a lead in 2029, when rising discontent could threaten his hold on power.”
“Southern concerns could be addressed by freezing seat allocations for decades to allow the north to catch up. However, Mr Modi seems to prefer expanding India’s parliament to prevent any state from losing representation, while shrinking southern influence. Much hinges on the timing of India’s census, a crucial tool for evidence-based policymaking,” the editorial says.
“If delimitation proceeds before 2029 it could reshape India’s political landscape to the BJP’s advantage—but at the cost of a growing north-south rift that threatens to fracture the Indian union.”
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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