India could soon experience heat waves that break human survivability limit: World Bank report
Thiruvananthapuram (PTI): Severe heat waves, responsible for thousands of deaths across India over the last few decades, are increasing with alarming frequency and soon the country could become one of the first places in the world to experience heat waves that break the human survivability limit, according to a new report.
The World Bank report, titled "Climate Investment Opportunities in India's Cooling Sector," said that the country is experiencing higher temperatures that arrive earlier and stay far longer.
"In April 2022, India was plunged into the grip of a punishing early spring heat wave that brought the country to a standstill, with temperatures in the capital, New Delhi, topping 46 degrees Celsius (oC) (114 degrees Fahrenheit). The month of March, which witnessed extraordinary spikes in temperatures, was the hottest ever recorded", it said.
The report will be released during the two-day "India Climate and Development Partners' Meet" being organized by World Bank in partnership with the Kerala government here.
Predicting that the heat wave situation in India could break the human survivability limit, it said that the recent heat wave supports what many climate scientists have long cautioned about with reference to rising temperatures across South Asia.
"In August 2021, the Sixth Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the Indian subcontinent would suffer more frequent and intense heat waves over the coming decade.
"The G20 Climate Risk Atlas also warned in 2021 that heat waves across India were likely to last 25 times longer by 2036-65 if carbon emissions remain high, as in the IPCC's worst-case emission scenario," the report said.
It also warned that rising heat across India can jeopardize economic productivity.
"Up to 75 percent of India's workforce, or 380 million people, depend on heat-exposed labor, at times working in potentially life-threatening temperatures. ...By 2030, India may account for 34 million of the projected 80 million global job losses from heat stress associated productivity decline", the report said.
It further said that India showed the largest heat exposure impacts on heavy labor among the South Asian countries, with more than 101 billion hours lost a year.
An analysis by the global management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, shows that lost labor from rising heat and humidity could put up to 4.5 per cent of India's GDP approximately USD 150-250 billion at risk by the end of this decade.
It said that India's long-term food security and public health security will depend on a reliable cold chain network. Transporting food and pharmaceutical goods across India requires a system of cold chain refrigeration that works every step of the way.
"A single temperature lapse in the journey can break the cold chain, spoiling fresh produce and weakening the potency of vaccines. With only 4 per cent of fresh produce in India covered by cold chain facilities, annual estimated food losses total USD 13 billion", it said.
It also noted that the third largest producer of pharmaceuticals in the world, pre-COVID-19, India lost approximately 20 percent of temperature-sensitive medical products and 25 percent of vaccines due to broken cold chains, leading to losses of USD 313 million a year.
"As temperatures rise across India, so will the demand for cooling. However, in a country where two-thirds of the population live on less than USD 2 a day, and where the average cost of an air-conditioning unit can vary between USD 260 and USD 500, air-cooling systems are a luxury available only to a few."
According to analysis presented in the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP), only eight per cent of Indian households own air-conditioning units.
"Indoor and electric fans can help to maintain thermal comfort, but these too are expensive to buy and inefficient. As a result, many poor and marginalized communities across India are more vulnerable to extreme heat, living in inadequately ventilated, hot and crowded homes without proper access to cooling", the report warned.
Staying cool during extreme heat is about more than just comfort – it can constitute the precarious line between life and death, it added.
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BJP asks Sonia Gandhi to return Nehru letters to Prime Ministers' Museum and Library
New Delhi (PTI): The BJP on Monday asked former Congress president Sonia Gandhi to return the correspondences of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru with a host of personalities to the Prime Ministers' Museum and Library, saying the historical documents belonged to the country and were not anyone's personal property.
BJP MP and spokesperson Sambit Patra cited reports of the Prime Ministers' Museum and Library's (PMML) deliberations on the issue to note that Nehru's correspondences with Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy to India, and eminent leaders Jayaprakash Narayan and Jagjivan Ram lay with the erstwhile Nehru Museum and Library Society, which returned them to Sonia Gandhi in 2008.
The Nehru museum was expanded to include memorials to all prime ministers and renamed the Prime Ministers' Museum and Library after the BJP came to power at the Centre.
Patra told reporters that 51 cartons of Nehru's correspondences were given to Sonia Gandhi after approval of the museum's then director.
However, following a legal opinion, Rizwan Kadri -- one of the 29 members of the society tasked with running the PMML -- recently wrote to Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, seeking his help in restoring the papers to the museum's custody, he added.
The BJP leader said Kadri did not receive any reply.
Taking a swipe at the Gandhi family, Patra said these were not personal property but historical documents part of the "treasure" of India.
As Nehru was a member of the family, it suffers from a sense of entitlement over his letters, he alleged.
He asked, "What were the contents of the letter that the first family felt should not be made public?"
He noted that the digitisation process began in the museum in 2010 but the Gandhi family decided to take back the letters' possession before that.
Patra had earlier raised the issue in the Lok Sabha during Question Hour but Union Culture Minister Gejendra Singh Shekhawat declined to answer, saying his query was unrelated to the written question submitted in advance.
