Record heatwave triggers power outages across South Asia

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Big Picture

This is a large-scale, acute infrastructure stress event triggered by an extreme heatwave across South Asia. The situation is consequential because it simultaneously tests the resilience of national power grids, public health systems, and governance structures in one of the world's most populous regions. The event exposes not only immediate operational limits but also deeper systemic vulnerabilities in the face of intensifying climate risks.

What Happened

Over recent days, a record-breaking heatwave has driven temperatures well above historical norms throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and neighboring areas. This has led to unprecedented electricity demand, overwhelming national grids and causing widespread power outages in both urban centers and rural communities. The outages have disrupted critical infrastructure—including water supply and healthcare—while authorities struggle to restore power and manage cascading effects on economic activity and social stability.

Why It Matters

The current crisis exposes acute weaknesses in South Asia's critical infrastructure, particularly the capacity and resilience of national power grids under climate-driven stress. The simultaneous strain on electricity generation and demand reveals longstanding issues in grid maintenance, fuel supply chains, and emergency preparedness. These outages are not isolated incidents but symptoms of deeper fragility, with direct consequences for public health, political legitimacy, and economic continuity. The situation highlights how climate shocks can rapidly escalate into multi-system risks with regional spillover potential.

Strategic Lens

Main actors—including governments, grid operators, and utilities—face severe trade-offs between restoring essential services and managing public order. Their response options are constrained by limited generation reserves, aging infrastructure, fuel bottlenecks, and the sheer scale of demand. Political leaders must balance immediate crisis management against the risk of unrest as basic services falter. While rational actors will seek to stabilize the system and maintain legitimacy, structural deficits in infrastructure investment and climate adaptation limit their ability to prevent recurrence or escalation.

What Comes Next

Most Likely: The crisis will be managed through targeted restoration of power to critical infrastructure, rolling blackouts to ration supply, and emergency relief measures. Governments will prioritize public order through information management and relief efforts. Economic losses will accumulate but large-scale unrest will likely be contained. Debate over infrastructure reform will intensify but substantive change will be slow due to fiscal and bureaucratic constraints.

Most Dangerous: A persistent or worsening grid failure could trigger cascading breakdowns across health, water, and economic systems. Public anger may escalate into widespread unrest or attacks on infrastructure. Political responses could become coercive or destabilizing, eroding trust further. Regional cooperation may falter if cross-border resource tensions rise. In this scenario, loss of control could lead to protracted crisis with lasting damage to governance and economic stability.

How we got here

\n\nSouth Asia’s critical infrastructure—especially its national power grids—was originally designed to support rapid post-independence development and urbanization. In the decades following partition and decolonization, governments prioritized expanding electricity access as a symbol of progress and a tool for economic growth. The focus was on building generation capacity quickly, often relying on coal, hydro, and later natural gas, with grid networks extended to reach growing cities and rural populations. The underlying assumption was that demand would rise steadily but predictably, and that seasonal extremes could be managed with existing reserves and maintenance cycles.\n\nOver time, this approach led to a patchwork of aging infrastructure, uneven investment in grid modernization, and chronic underfunding of maintenance. Political pressure to keep electricity affordable—and to avoid unpopular blackouts—meant that utilities often deferred upgrades or ran plants beyond optimal capacity. Regional coordination was limited by administrative boundaries and competing interests among states or provinces. Meanwhile, the pace of urbanization and the proliferation of air conditioning outstripped planners’ forecasts, especially as middle-class aspirations grew. Efforts to diversify energy sources or build resilience into the grid were frequently sidelined in favor of short-term fixes or headline projects.\n\nIn parallel, climate adaptation was not built into the original design logic of these systems. Water-intensive thermal and hydro plants assumed stable river flows and manageable heat; few anticipated the compounding effects of extreme weather on both supply (generation) and demand (cooling needs). As heatwaves became more frequent and severe, the gap between what the grid could handle and what society expected quietly widened. Today’s acute stress is the result of these accumulated choices: a system stretched by decades of incremental compromise, now facing shocks it was never structured to absorb."}