The weather across the region in April is generally hot, and comes before Asia’s annual summer monsoon, which dumps rain on parched soil.
Nur-e-Alam, who pulls a rickshaw by hand in Dhaka’s Mogbazar area, said he had scaled back to five to seven hours a day, down from eight to 10, because of the heat.
The heat wave poses similar challenges in neighboring India, where extreme temperatures have strained power grids, forced school closures, and threatened the production of wheat and other crops.
Extreme heat also has a political dimension in Myanmar, where the ruling military junta cited soaring temperatures last week as justification for moving Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s ousted civilian leader, from prison to an undisclosed location.
Many people in Myanmar believe that generals are moving her for other reasons but using the heat — the capital recently hit 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit — as a pretext.
And the region is in the middle of an El Niño cycle, a climate phenomenon that tends to create warm, dry conditions in Asia.
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