Come to think of it, it really is insane that my entire country is burning alive and literally no one in the rest of the world cares. Thousands of Indians are dying every day from the heat, it's 45+ degrees in multiple areas, the government couldn't give two fucks, we're getting severe warnings and red alerts, and not a soul outside of South Asia is speaking about it because why would you ever care about brown people
please keep talking about how Becky from Maryland doesn't like the rising gas prices. It's clearly the more pressing issue.
USA folks, that is a consistent temperature range hitting 113Ā°. Death Valley temperatures. In Banda, it hovered between 116Ā°-118Ā° (47Ā°-48Ā° C) for a week straight.
This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:
ActionAid India
SEEDS India
GlobalGiving
Raise India (Project Tapan)
[ID: the first image is a colour-coded map showing the surface land temperature in India. The majority of the map is a deep red, indicating 40Ā°C or higher, with some inland areas being black and grey, indicating 50-60Ā°C. The second image is text reading as follows:
I want to explain what 48 degrees actually feels like when you live in a developing country, because it is terrifying. You can't just "stay inside and run the AC". The power grid simply cannot handle the load of millions of people trying to cool down, so we are dealing with rolling blackouts. Imagine sitting in the pitch dark in a concrete room that has been baking in the sun for 12 hours, with no ceiling fan, while the ambient temperature inside is still hovering near 40Ā°C at midnight. You don't sleep; you just pass out from exhaustion. The taps are running dry because the heat evaporates local reservoirs and water usage spikes. People who have to work outsideāstreet vendors, construction workers, delivery driversāare collapsing. Even the water coming out of the cold tap during the day is hot enough to literally brew tea.
The third image is a statistic reading "97 of world's hottest cities in India as brutal heatwave pushes temperatures past 45Ā°C". The fourth image is a headline reading "Laboring Under Delhi's Harsh Heat, Workers Must Choose Health or Wages", with a subheading reading "Severe heat waves have been hitting India since April, forcing many of the country's essential workers to make tough decisions." The final image is text reading as follows:
"We estimate that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally; a five-day heatwave causes nearly 30,000," the authors wrote. Heatwave to severe heatwave conditions were prevailing in the north, central and east India, with temperatures consistently exceeding 45 degrees Celsius in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, parts of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana over the past few days. Mapping heat-induced mortality risk to individual districts revealed that the state of Uttar Pradesh alone accounts for about 8,100 excess deaths during a five-day heatwave, while excess deaths in districts, including Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Surat, each exceeded 250 in a single event.
/ID]
