Abdur Rahman nearly fainted while pulling his rickshaw under the scorching sun in Bangladesh’s capital city. “It is not possible to continue doing this in such weather,” he told Al Jazeera. For the last few weeks, the slum in Dhaka where Rahman lives has hardly had any electricity at night.
A crippling power crisis has added to the misery of the Bangladeshis as they reel under the country’s longest heatwave in decades.
Tens of thousands of primary and secondary schools have been shut down by the government this week as temperatures surged to more than 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in Dhaka. Other cities such as Rangpur recorded a high of 41 degrees Celsius – the highest there since 1958.
Officials at the Bangladesh Meteorological Department said they had not seen such a prolonged heatwave since the country’s independence in 1971.
Credit: Aljazeera.com
