"Climate change is not merely an environmental issue but a governance and social justice challenge." Examine this statement with reference to urban sanitation workers in India.

Rising heat is no longer an episodic weather event but a structural occupational hazard: WHO and WMO note that worker output falls 2–3% for every degree above 20°C, and that over 2.4 billion workers face excessive heat exposure globally [1]. For India's urban sanitation workers — sweepers, drain and sewer cleaners, waste handlers — climate change therefore lands as a question of who governs risk and who bears it.

Climate change as an environmental issue — the baseline

• More frequent, longer and intense heatwaves, amplified in cities by the urban heat island effect, raise ambient exposure for outdoor workers.
• India's response architecture — the NAPCC's eight missions, including the Sustainable Habitat Mission, and the NDC (2031–2035) targeting a 47% emissions-intensity cut by 2035 — remains framed around mitigation and ecosystems [2][3].

Why it is a governance challenge

• Institutional fragmentation: climate sits with MoEFCC, occupational health with the Ministry of Labour, urban services with MoHUA — no single agency owns the intersection.
• Capacity deficit at the cutting edge: SAPCCs exist in most States/UTs, but Urban Local Bodies executing sanitation contracts lack dedicated climate cells [2].
• Response so far is advisory, not statutory — the Labour Ministry's heatwave advisory recommends rescheduled hours, drinking water, rest and cooling areas, and ESIC heat-stroke help desks, but is not enforceable [4].

Why it is a social justice challenge

• Sanitation work is caste-stratified and largely informal; contract workers fall outside the protective reach of the Factories Act, 1948 and BOCW Act, 1996.
• Health burdens — heatstroke, dehydration, kidney dysfunction, neurological effects — compound income loss for casual earners [1]. ILO records that informal workers, migrants and women suffer most [5].
• Article 21 guarantees life with dignity; NAMASTE, with PPE kits and AB-PMJAY cover for sewer and septic-tank workers, shows targeted protection is administratively feasible [6].

Climate vulnerability is thus produced as much by institutional design as by temperature. The way forward is convergence: fold occupational heat-health protocols into SAPCCs and municipal sanitation contracts, give ULBs climate cells, and extend NAMASTE-style entitlements to heat risk. Doing so aligns climate governance with Article 21 and SDG 8's promise of decent work — making climate action genuinely inclusive.