Heatwaves

Story hook

29 May 2024, Mungeshpur, north-west Delhi. The IMD's automatic weather station blinks 52.9 °C at 3:30 pm — the highest temperature ever recorded in the National Capital. A construction labourer collapses on a Dwarka building site. A homeless man dies at the New Delhi railway station benches at 41 °C midnight. By the end of the month, 143 official heatwave deaths are recorded across India; civil-society tallies put the figure five times higher. Power demand crosses 250 GW, a record. The Air Force airlifts ice slabs to crowd-control sites in the Lok Sabha campaign trail.

Two thousand kilometres south, in Uttarakhand's Pauri Garhwal, a different inferno burns. A spark from a chir pine needle pile — combustible resin-rich biomass that builds up every dry season — catches and races up the slope. By 5 June, 1,180 hectares of forest are ablaze across 40 districts. Helicopter Bambi-buckets dump Tehri-dam water on flames that recede at night and resurge at dawn.

Six months later, December 2024, Kashmir's Chillai Kalan — the 40-day "great cold" — pushes Srinagar to -8.5 °C. Pipes freeze in Sopore; a Dal Lake shikara owner dies of hypothermia in his houseboat; Delhi's cold wave kills 176 homeless between December and February. Three faces of the same crisis — temperature extremes — all currently unnotified under India's Disaster Management Act.

Why this matters for UPSC

GS-III Mains has asked heatwaves directly in 2020 ("Discuss the causes and consequences of heat waves in India") and folded forest fires into climate-disaster questions in 2018 and 2023. Prelims tested NDMA's heat wave guidelines (2019, 2021) and the Forest Survey of India fire alerts in 2022. The unit's centre of gravity is the non-notification debate — why disasters that kill the most still don't unlock NDRF funds.