With an unusual harsh summer beating down hard across most parts of Southern India, villagers in rural Mysore, tourists in Fort Kochi and apartment owners in Sarjapur Road have been taken by surprise. Most discussions in the past few weeks are centered around the severity of the summer and how to cope with it. At the same time, a couple of months back, families in Northern India were shivering from a record extended winter.
Strangely, there are many who claim that the extreme weather has been a blessing in disguise as these aberrations can no longer be dismissed as unusual phenomenon. The climate has wildly fluctuated in the past decade with extreme lows in winter being offset by extremely hot heatwaves for three to four months in a year.
The last decade saw the six warmest years since records began to be mentioned. Even more interesting is that eleven warmest months were recorded in the past fifteen years. While most of India’s scorched cities brace for the month of May, concerns over an increase in heat wave related moralities have risen.