'Severe heatwave conditions continue to prevail over Orissa, parts of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, northeast Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, east Madhya Pradesh and coastal Andhra Pradesh. The heatwave conditions are likely to continue for the next 48 hours.'
The daily all-India weather report from the Indian Meteorological Department has a ring of finality at this time of the year.
Come summer, India waits for the biggest natural calamity to occur: a scorching heatwave, that hits much of north India and parts of the south, making people collapse on streets, suffer sunstroke and even vomit blood, and sometimes die.
This year, too, the severe heatwave that is sweeping across north India is making life hellish for many, especially the poor.
The intense heatwave has forced states like Orissa and Jharkhand to declare school holidays till further notice.
Nation-wide figures of how many people die every year due to the heatwave are hard to come by, since no such records are maintained.
Met department officials told rediff.com the National Disaster Management Cell, working jointly under the federal home ministry and the department of science and technology, monitors the heatwave deaths.
But an official at the cell said: "The heatwave has not yet been notified as a natural calamity. So we don't have nation-wide data. You need to contact respective state governments."
The NDMC, which was set up two years back, is yet to get a "notification at the Centre", the official added.
Officials say heatwave and coldwave are not included in the list of natural disasters and hence there is no monitoring of these calamities at the national level.
The cell, however, assists state governments in facing natural disasters like cyclones, earthquakes, floods and droughts.
Dr P V Joseph, former director of IMD, says it is high time India notified cold and heatwaves as natural calamities. "Whether it is flood, earthquake, tsunami or heatwave, it is a natural calamity, and the end-result is that people die," he points out.
In the last five years, he added, on an average more than 1,500 people have died every year because of the blistering heatwave.
The following figures should give an idea of the calamity:
- The Orissa government has officially declared that 220 people have already died in heatwaves that shot the temperatures up to 49.3 degrees Celsius across the state.
- The hardest-hit state is Andhra Pradesh where some 430 people have died in heatwave conditions this year. For some years now, northern desert winds have led to an abnormally hot May in states like Andhra Pradesh. In 1996, some 1,300 people died of heatwave in Andhra Pradesh. Last year, some 1,030 people died in the heatwave in just one week in May. On an average, between 1000 and 1500 people die in heatwave conditions in Andhra Pradesh alone.
- The temperature in Jharkhand has been hovering around 40 degrees Celsius for a few days. Some 42 people have already fallen victim to the sweltering heat in the state. In Ranchi, the capital, an accident victim who lay unconscious on the road died of the severe burns suffered from the scorching tarmac.
- Dust-storms have made the heatwave conditions worse in the north.
IMD officials point out that the present heat condition is due to the fact that the summer sun is heating the landmass over the South Asian subcontinent, with the winds from the west and north-west carrying this to the coast. For the situation to change, either the land has to be cooled with rain or the wind directions have to change, they say.
IMD's local director in Kerala M D Ramachandran says the main cause behind the heatwave is the absence of a north-south trough in May.
"It generally negates the hot winds from the desert plains of Rajasthan and central India," he pointed out.
According to him, the atmospheric circulation pattern, which had turned favourable following the development of a low pressure area over west-central Bay of Bengal, has once again changed to hot and dry westerly and north-westerly winds which are extending across central India into Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.
Then there is that old culprit, which gets named for every climatic change: the El Nino.
In El Nino, the trade winds (flowing from the west to east over the Pacific Ocean) relax in the central and western parts of the ocean, leaving warm water in the east Pacific. Heavy rainfall follows the warm water eastward, leading to flooding in Peru and California, among other places. Meanwhile, areas far to the west, such as Indonesia and Australia, suffer droughts.
Though El Nino is a phenomenon that takes place in the Pacific, experts have warned that it causes climatic repercussions and global warming.
While experts debate the nuances of heat wave, health activists blame government apathy as the root-cause of mounting deaths due to sun-stroke across India in summer every year.
"Continuing heatwave deaths are something that India invites every year. The government has not cared to take any measures to tackle this tragedy," laments Dr K P Ramanujam, a health specialist based in Hyderabad.
For instance, Dr Ramanujam says, every year, before the summer sets in, the government can arrange oral rehydration salt sachets, halogen tablets and bags of bleaching powder for distribution in the most heat-affected districts.
"Heathwave should be treated as a calamity because severe drought-prone districts in India are faced with an acute shortage of drinking water. There should be a multi-pronged strategy to tackle the heatwave," he insisted.
Sadly, no contingency plan exists in the country to tackle the recurrence of deaths due to blistering heatwave and sunstroke.
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