India braced for further dust storms Fourteen held for abused Indian girl’s murder
India’s northern states braced for more dust storms at the weekend, after more than 140 people died in the states of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh after severe storms late last week.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, were criticised on Friday for continuing to campaign for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in state elections in Karnataka as the loss of lives and property in the northern states mounted.
“My heartfelt condolences to the families who have lost their loved ones,” Siddaramaiah, the Congress chief minister of Karnataka, said on Thursday.
“I am sorry your [chief minister] is needed here in Karnataka. I am sure he will return soon and attend to his work there,” he said sarcastically.
Mr Adityanath returned to his state yesterday to visit hospitals.
Mr Modi tweeted on Thursday that he was “saddened” by the loss of lives.
The storms, which began on Wednesday, brought winds of more than 130kph, which uprooted trees and demolished small homes.
Roads were blocked, stopping relief staff from reaching some of the worst-affected areas. Trains and interstate buses experienced delays.
Mobile telephone networks temporarily collapsed. Electricity poles went down, cutting power to parts of at least 20 districts in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The damage was perhaps worst in Agra, where 43 people have been confirmed dead.
Mritunjay Mohapatra, director general of India’s Meteorological Department, said that high summer temperatures had helped to build a near-cyclonic disturbance above the state of Haryana.
The hotspot combined with a low-pressure system carrying moisture from Eurasia into the Indian subcontinent to produce what Mahesh Palawat, chief meteorologist at Skymet Weather in New Delhi, called a freak storm.
“Dust storms are not usually this intense,” Mr Palawat told the Hindustan Times newspaper on Friday.
In 2011, a paper published in
Nature argued that air pollution and rising temperatures are worsening storms that build over Asia.
More storms may hit Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan again before tomorrow or they may strike further north, in Jammu and Kashmir and the hill states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
Such storms are common before the monsoon season, when temperatures over the north Indian plains – and the Rajasthan desert, in particular – soar well above 40°C. The monsoon is due to hit India in six weeks.
Hemant Gera, secretary for disaster management in Rajasthan, said that this storm was the worst he had ever seen in his 20 years at his post.
“Whenever we’ve issued an alert in recent times, it has been a yellow alert, which warns about probable storms,” Mr Gera said.
The Meteorological Department, which admitted that its Doppler radar system in Rajasthan had not been working for the past 10 days, was unable to determine the intensity of the wind and rain.
The yellow alert remains in place for Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh until tomorrow.
Police yesterday arrested 14 men after a teenager was raped and burnt alive at her home in eastern India.
The girl, 16, was abducted from her home while her family was at a wedding and raped in a forested area of Jharkhand state on Thursday, police said.
The family complained to the village council, which on Friday ordered the two accused men to do 100 sit-ups and pay a fine of 50,000 rupees (Dh2,474).
Village councils of local elders often settle disputes, bypassing India’s slow, expensive judicial system. Although they carry no legal weight, they exert massive influence over rural life.
Police said the punishment enraged the men, who beat the girl’s parents before setting her on fire.
“The two accused thrashed the parents and rushed to the house where they set the girl ablaze with the help of their accomplices,” said Ashok Ram, the officer in charge of the local police station.
Mr Ram said they had arrested 14 men over the case so far although the main suspect was still on the run.
Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das said he was shocked by the “gruesome incident” and called for stringent action against the culprits. The incident comes as India reels under a long string of violent sexual crimes despite tightening of laws.
On Friday a man, 55, allegedly committed suicide after being accused of raping a nineyear-old in southern Andhra Pradesh state, the Press Trust of India reported.
Protests have been held across the country since details emerged last month about a girl, 8, being gang-raped and murdered in Jammu and Kashmir.
About 40,000 rape cases were reported in 2016, with many more believed to go unreported because of stigma attached to sex crimes in patriarchal India.