It’s unlikely that the city would have an immediate respite from the heat wave-like conditions, said officials at the India Meteorological Department.

The mercury level of the city has been above the 40-degreemark over the past 48 hours. “Currently, we are getting the northwesterly wind which is completely dry and hot.

There is no possibility of rain in the next five days at least,” said Sanjeev Banerjee, deputy director-general of the Indian Meteorological Department at Alipore. Kolkata has recorded a higher average temperature than several usually hotter areas of India, and it has the greatest maximum temperature among India’s major cities. In the last 24 hours, Salt Lake registered a temperature of 42.1 degrees Celsius, while Bankura had the highest temperature at 42.7. The maximum temperatures recorded over the past few days have been above four degrees above normal.

As a result, a red alert was issued for Kolkata, South and North 24-Parganas, Midnapore, Howrah, Hooghly, Burdwan, Jhargram, Purulia, Nadia, Bankura, Birbhum, and Murshidabad.

The IMD anticipated that the heat wave would last till 19 April in Kolkata and many districts of south Bengal. The city has not experienced this amount of temperature spike and ongoing heat wave conditions, according to Met authorities, since April 2016.

All educational institutions in the State will be closed next week (17-22 April) due to a weather warning, announced chief minister Mamata Banerjee. Educational institutions located in the hills of the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts are exempted.

Additionally, the government gave the directives to hold extra classes as soon as the institutions opened in order to make up for the loss. “It was very difficult to conduct all the PE and other activities outside the classrooms. So, somewhere down the line we were all anticipating that this notification would definitely come. And it came as a boon too.

As soon as it was declared, immediately we transformed the physical classroom into an online classroom till the beginning of the summer break, as planned earlier,” said Sharmili Shah, principal, Acharya Tulsi of Orchids, The International School.