For three summers running, India has broken its own temperature records, and three years running, its monsoon has refused to behave like a season at all. In 2026, nearly all of the world’s hundred hottest cities were Indian; Balangir in Odisha touched 48°C, Banda in Uttar Pradesh crossed 47°C, and the power grid logged an all-time peak demand of close to 271 gigawatts as a nation reached for its air-conditioners and coolers. A year earlier, the country recorded extreme weather — heat, cloudbursts, floods, lightning — on 331 of 334 days, killing more than 4,400 people and damaging crops across 11 million hectares. This year’s monsoon, by contrast, arrived late and limped along, leaving three-quarters of the country short of normal rainfall even as last year’s season ended in........

© The Pioneer