Abdur Rahman, a rickshaw puller in Dhaka, Bangladesh, struggles to work under the blazing sun as town experiences its longest heatwave in many years. Adding to the misery is a crippling power crisis, leaving Rahman and many others with out electrical energy at night. The government has closed tens of hundreds of major and secondary schools because of hovering temperatures exceeding 40 levels Celsius in Dhaka and 41 levels Celsius in Rangpur – the best since 1958.
Bangladesh Meteorological Department officials have not seen such a chronic heatwave for the rationale that nation’s independence in 1971. Kickstart is further exacerbated by the suspension of operations at the country’s largest energy plant as a result of a decline in international trade reserves and the depreciation of the Bangladeshi taka by about 25% against the US dollar last 12 months.
As a outcome, the South Asian nation of a hundred and seventy million folks is dealing with unprecedented load-shedding of about 2,500 megawatts, equal to what the nation produced in the late Nineties. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina acknowledged the people’s suffering and mentioned the extraordinary heatwave has solely worsened the state of affairs. The authorities has signed deals with Qatar and Oman to buy gasoline and brought measures to import more coal.
Bangladesh’s industries, including the crucial ready-made garments (RMG) sector, which accounts for over 80% of its export earnings, have been hit exhausting by energy outages. Factory homeowners say the crisis has raised their production prices and forced them to cut or delay output. Sazzad Hossain, an RMG company proprietor, advised Al Jazeera that machines in his factory are silent for hours due to frequent energy cuts..