India’s deadly heatwaves are getting even hotter
The consequences of climate change will be horrific for the Indo-Gangetic Plain
In the opening scenes of “The Ministry for the Future”, the American novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines what happens to a small Indian town hit by a heatwave. Streets empty as normal activity becomes impossible. Air-conditioned rooms fill with silent fugitives from the heat. Rooftops are littered with the corpses of people sleeping outside in search of a non-existent breath of wind. The electricity grid, then law and order, break down. Like a medieval vision of hell, the local lake fills with half-poached bodies. Across north India, 20m die in a week.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “At the limits of human endurance”
From the April 8th 2023 edition
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