A tale of mixed fortunes for south and east Asia by Helen Willetts
The heat wave which we reported on earlier in the week occurring across India and Bangladesh has continued and intensified throughout the last few days. The death toll rose sharply across many parts of central and southern India after an extremely hot weekend. In Orissa, one of the eastern states of India, temperatures rocketed to an astounding 49C (120.2 F) on Sunday. The Met department have said that the heat will probably continue at much the same intensity for another two days.
Meanwhile further south the monsoon, which will bring cooling relief to this situation is still a long way south. It has only progressed very slowly inland throughout the last week. Computer models are not showing much, if any in the way of progression of the monsoon in the coming days-which alarms the Indian Meteorological Department-as temperatures continue to soar and death tolls continue to rise.
The four month monsoon struck the southern state of Kerala on June 5th after a delay of 4 days, and has only slowly pushed its way into other regions inland. Its progress is being carefully watched and anticipated by two-thirds of India’s billion-plus population, who make a living from the farm sector that generates about a quarter of the Indian economy. This shows how crucial the monsoon is to not only the people, but also the prosperity of the country, a country hinged on rain. The reason for the reliance on the monsoon is purely because of the poor irrigation network across India, so therefore the rains being their only opportunity to water the crops. Without this rain the crops would fail, the population would starve and the economy would slump. The failed rain of 1912 in India, due to an El Nino occurrence gave India one of its worst famines in history.
As the south of India swelters and prays for the arrival of the cooling monsoon rains, rain battered the northeast of China at the end of last week and into the weekend. The town of Shalan, in the northeast province of Heilongjiang was flooded on Friday before being hit by a torrent of water which cascaded down a mountain side, smashing into the town and overwhelming it with floods. 18 villages in the area were also completely destroyed by the wall of mountain water. Thousands of soldiers and rescue teams have been called on to help in the crisis, where $610,000 has been allocated to the relief efforts.
Check out our special section on the BBC weather web-page to watch the build up and the progression of the monsoon.
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