 South Asia is experiencing extreme heat with temperatures crossing 48 degree Celsius in many parts of the region. India had the hottest March and April in almost a century this year. In Delhi, the temperatures climbed to just around 50 degree Celsius and stayed there. On May 15, the temperature in Pakistan hit 51 degree Celsius. Some schools have closed early, hospitals are on high alert and at least 25 people have died as a result of the heat. Heat waves first hit parts of Central, South and West Asia in March and have since been linked to an uptick in heat-related deaths, wheat crop failures, power outages and fires with poor and marginalized communities particularly affected across the region, according to Ever since the fourth assessment report that's almost 15 years ago, it has been predicted that climate change would lead to more frequent heat waves and more intense heat waves. This has been known for the past 15 years or more. The extent to which we know this has in fact deepened, the knowledge is more certain and the probability with which such heat waves would occur more frequently has increased. Speaking to the Guardian, Mariam Zakaria, a researcher of water and climate at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said that before human activities increased global temperatures, we would have seen the heat that hit India earlier this month around once in 50 years. But now it is a much more common event, we can expect such high temperatures about once in every four years. Air conditioning is only available to a small percentage of people in South Asia. As of 2019, only 7% of Indian households had it. Nonetheless, the use of cooling technologies has increased dramatically, to the point where the Indian state governments of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh are forcing power cuts on enterprises to reduce energy use. In the middle of the heat waves, India faces a potential crisis as coal stocks the country's primary source of electricity run low. A dearth of rainfall this season in addition to the heat waves has put a strain on several regions' water supplies. Temperatures are expected to last until the annual monsoon arrives later this summer. At present, the international meteorological agencies have said that while earlier heat waves of such intensity and frequency would have occurred maybe once in 300 years, now the probability would have gone up by close to 100 times that is such heat waves are likely to occur once in three years, if not more frequently. Now what is special about this heat wave that we are going through now is that it is much earlier than such heat waves usually occur. It has lasted longer in an unbroken way and it has been sharper, more intense where it has occurred that is long periods of high temperatures. It is important to understand that we are running close to the limits of human tolerance to heat. Temperatures of North Western India and even more parts of the Punjab in Pakistan have recorded 50 degrees Celsius plus and temperatures of this magnitude persisting over a couple of weeks are fairly close to the limits of what the human body can bear and such heat waves actually pose a threat to life, particularly for more vulnerable people, those who work out in the open, young children, infants and the elderly. We haven't yet seen confirmed figures of deaths from these heat waves but I am sure we will. But it is also important to recognize that these heat waves are not just ambient temperature related phenomena. These heat waves have also had impact on the wheat harvest for example. Many parts of the Punjab in India have recorded 10 to 20 percent lower yield per hectare at the moment. These are largely anecdotal evidence but agricultural scientists in Punjab have noted that this is taking place and they are compiling such information and this is partly also seen in what was earlier in visit to be a fairly substantial bumper harvest of wheat has now come down substantially as reported in many ways. These have also resulted in the floods that we are witnessing in the northeast of India which are again about several weeks earlier than usually happens partly also as a result of these heat waves. According to climate activist Saad Amir when looking at the heat wave a lot of media attention is focused on India but it is also scorching through Pakistan and Bangladesh. The whole region right now is experiencing record heat. The excessive heat also increases the risk of wildfires deteriorating the air quality even further. According to a report issued on Wednesday by the United Kingdom Met Office climate change has increased the likelihood of record breaking heat wave in northwest India and Pakistan in April and May by more than 100 times. The report says that earlier the chance of a heat wave exceeding the brutal 2010 average temperature was once every 312 years now it has become once every 3.12 years. In the months of April and May of 2010 the region experienced its highest combined average temperature since 1900. Although a new record is expected climate scientists will have to wait until the end of the month when all of the April May temperature records have been compiled to know if the current heat wave will surpass the level seen in 2010. We should see heat waves not only in isolation but as part of a series of changes of climate with its antecedent impacts on agriculture, on river water flows, floods and droughts etc. that we are witnessing and which unfortunately we have not even started responding to in a systematic way either as government or as society and it is time that the government intervenes now in an extremely meaningful way with some immediacy to such interventions not that you are going to stop the temperature from going up but you can intervene to make sure that the impacts of that in terms of droughts, flood control and productivity of cultivation are substantially mitigated and that is what we should be working towards.