New Delhi : Night temperatures for the next week will be higher than normal, the India Meteorological Centre has said. In fact, it is the hottest April in five years and the heat will get worse as the summer truly sets in.
Already, nearly 70 people have succumbed to heat conditions in Odisha and Telangana. Vidarbha and Marathwada in Maharashtra, Telangana, parts of Rayalseema, east and west Rajasthan, Delhi and the NCR region,
Punjab and Haryana, Odisha and Gangetic West Bengal will be in the heat wave zone, the IMD statement adds.
The maximum temperature in Delhi on Thursday was recorded at 41 degrees Celsius, four notches above normal. The capital of Odisha, Bhubaneswar, is almost a mini furnace with temperature touching 45 degrees this week and schools having been ordered to remain closed till April 20. Nalgonda in Andhra Pradesh is sizzling at 44 degrees Celsius. Incidentally, Hyderabad observed its maximum at 43 degree Celsius which is the highest in 43 years.
With that, the water storage in 91 major water reservoirs in the country has also dipped to a 10-year low of about 23%, a met department official was quoted as saying by the NDTV.
Northwest India, which was recording lower maximums, as compared to East and Central India, is also likely to get caught in the intense heat wave conditions
Skymet, a private weather forecasting agency, has said there is likely to be a gradual increase of one to three degrees in temperature over the next two days across Delhi, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
In Karnataka, the first state to declare drought this year, at least 500 villages are now completely dependent on water supplied by tankers as there is no supply from the municipal body. Closer home, Latur in parched Marathwada is subsisting on lakhs of litres of water that is being ferried by special trains that the state government is running.
The thrust of the IMD forecast is that northwest India, which was recording lower maximums, as compared to East and Central India, is also likely to get caught in the intense heat wave conditions, Skymet said. — Agency and online compilation.
