India’s June Heat Wave Deaths Are a Harbinger of Worse to Come
As heat waves breaching the human survivability threshold loom in the not-too-distant future, experts question whether the country is properly prepared.
Bodies are cremated by the Ganges river in Ballia on June 23.
Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/BloombergAt a cremation ground on the banks of the Ganges river in Ballia, a district in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, head priest Pappu Pandey says he’s never experienced anything like the last few weeks.
One of his jobs is to keep a count of bodies. As a vicious combination of extreme heat and punishing pre-monsoon humidity blanketed the region, the ground became choked with pyres. Pandey says deaths doubled to nearly 50 a day at the peak of the heat wave in mid-June — numbers he’s not seen in 20 years at the site outside the Covid pandemic.