06/01/2026
380 MILLION LIVING IN CIRCUMSTANCE THAT EXCEEDS HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY CAPABILITY:
ALL TOP 50 HOTTEST CITIES IN THE WORLD LOCATED IN INDIA: (thank you, Patti Scoles ) "Across the country, temperatures have crossed 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit), inching towards 46, with Akola in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region recording the country’s highest temperature of 46.9C on April 26. Census workers have died, as have voters who stepped out in the recently concluded West Bengal election. A man who boarded a bus to attend a wedding died before he reached his destination. On a single day in late April, all of the top 50 hottest cities in the world were located in India
There is a violence to the light, the kind that makes you shield your eyes – even at 7am. With farmers unable to work outside, livestock under heat stress and crops failing, the United Nations is concerned that the heatwaves are pushing food supply “to the brink”. Even more alarming is that the extreme heat is causing not just heart attacks, but also kidney injury, affecting sleep quality and exacerbating numerous chronic conditions, including diabetes, respiratory illnesses and mental health conditions.
Here, between the government, the courts and private developers, there is an o**y of tree-felling across the worst-affected cities. In Nashik, despite protests, heritage banyan trees that have stood for decades, if not centuries, are being cut down. In Pune, too, old trees are making way for a four-lane highway. In Bengaluru, trees are making way for a metro train and in Kashmir, which has never experienced such heat, mulberry, walnut and chinar trees have to go for wider roads and “smarter” cities.
Back when he came to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi alarmed many Indian scientists and researchers by denying climate change. “Climate has not changed. We have changed. Our habits have changed,” he told students.
The heat pummelling India’s megacities is reinforcing longstanding inequalities of caste, class and gender in poor and marginalised communities. Our treeless streets are abandoned, save for the homeless and the street hawkers. The rich travel from their air-conditioned houses in their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned offices, malls and schools. The poor are being left to die in a country that keeps inventing new ways of neglecting its most vulnerable populations. Watching this heat, Harvard’s South Asia Institute released a white paper asking an innocuous question: how hot is too hot? Researchers say the human body can only handle so much heat before it can no longer cool itself, and that limit is below a wet-bulb temperature of 35C. Above this limit, even a young, healthy person resting in the shade with access to ample drinking water and skin fully coated in sweat would experience a continual rise in core temperature, leading to death from heatstroke within hours.
The paper grimly adds that nearly 380 million Indians are living in conditions that exceed the capabilities of human physiology.
As with every crisis, Modi had turned this deadly heatwave into a branding opportunity. With cameras rolling and citizens queueing up, government officials were seen forcefully wiping faces with towels whose origins were unknown. Much like COVID certificates that carried his photo, India’s newly rolled-out “cooling points” – unveiled across the national capital – were plastered with the prime minister’s face, and the taxpayer-funded heatwave action plan is the latest in a series of loyalty programmes that expect the public to remain indebted to the ruling party."
- Al Jazeera
