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NEW DELHI, June 6: Monsoon rains brought down temperatures across parts of India on Friday, easing a severe heatwave that has killed nearly 1,400 people in South Asia in three weeks.
Men, women and children in the northeast, which received this season’s first showers on Thursday, danced in the rain, while in other parts of the country pre-monsoon showers helped bring down temperatures.
Weather officials said daytime peak temperatures stayed below 47 degrees Celsius after soaring this week to 49 degrees Celsius in some places.
Millions have been searching for water as wells dried up, while many died of heatstroke and dehydration.
The monsoon had yet to hit the southern coast of Kerala state, where it normally breaks on June 1, but pre-monsoon showers indicated it would arrive in the next two or three days, India Meteorological Department officials said.
“The pre-monsoon showers are a great relief,” said Harish Menon, a resident of Irinjalakuda town in Kerala. “The heat was becoming unbearable. We in Kerala are used to heavy rains, not high temperatures,” he told Reuters.
Monsoon showers also lashed parts of Bangladesh, bringing down temperatures after a sweltering heatwave had killed 40 people there in the past three weeks.
DROUGHT, SORCHING TEMPERATURES: India has been reeling from a three-week hot spell that has killed nearly 1,285 — most of them homeless rickshaw pullers and street hawkers — in Andhra Pradesh alone.
Large parts of the country are critically short of water after rivers, lakes and wells dried up because of a drought that followed last year’s failed monsoon.
Onkar Prasad, a senior official at the Meteorological Department, said the heatwave had eased in the east and southeast of India, including in Andhra Pradesh state, where most of the deaths have occurred.—Reuters
