The intense heatwave in Pakistan and India claimed 156 more lives, raising the death toll due to oppressive heat conditions in the two countries to at least 340, media reports and officials said on Tuesday.
Eighty-two people perished in the heatwave in Pakistan, with 75 deaths being reported from the central province of Punjab where the mercury hovered around 50 degrees Celsius on Monday, the Daily Express newspaper said.
In neighbouring India, at least 74 people died in the hot spell in the northern and central regions on Monday, though light rain in some parts brought respite from the searing heat on Tuesday.
Hundreds more were hospitalised with heat stroke and gastroenteritis in Pakistan as the latest casualties raised the death toll to at least 192 in the current hot spell.
While temperatures touched 50 degrees Celsius in the plains areas of North-West Frontier Province, the Meteorological Department registered the record maximum temperature of 52 degrees Celsius in Sibi in the Baluchistan province.
Meanwhile, repeated power failures in the southern port city of Karachi prompted residents to block roads with burning tires in several districts, as well as pelt police vans with stones and harass the offices of local electricity providers.
Officials said 38 people — mostly the homeless, beggars and people working in the open — died from sunstroke and dehydration in India’s northern Haryana and Uttar Pradesh states, the PTI news agency reported.
Thirty-six people died in the national capital, New Delhi, and the Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan states, taking the death count since the end of April to 148.
The Indian Meteorological Department said Sriganganagar and Churu towns in Rajasthan were the hottest, recording 46,3 degrees Celsius and 46,1 degrees Celsius respectively.
Weather officials, who pointed out that the heatwave was caused by winds from the Thar desert that straddles the southern-half of the India-Pakistan border, forecast that the affected regions would soon get a break from the killer heat.
”We are expecting rain in northern parts of Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which will break the current unusual heatwave,” the head of the state meteorological services Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
Indian Meteorological Department director BP Yadav told reporters that the daytime temperature had already reached its peak for northern India and the mercury would gradually fall in the coming days.
The region’s summer starts in April, peaks in mid-May and continues until late June when the weather cools with the arrival of monsoon rains. But experts say the average summer temperatures have been rising. — Sapa-dpa