When winter tightens its grip on Deccan

When winter tightens its grip on Deccan

By : Jameel Aahmed Milansaar

There are winters that arrive gently, as a soft mist over the fields and a thin shawl over the shoulders. And then there are winters that come with intent. Karnataka, this week, is facing the latter. The Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre has warned that minimum temperatures across large parts of the State will dip 4–6 degrees below normal till 16 December, bringing cold wave to severe cold wave conditions over much of North Interior Karnataka and extending into South Interior and Malnad districts, with even Coastal Karnataka turning unusually chilly for a few days. This is not the romantic winter of postcards; it is a public health and livelihood event that demands preparation, not poetry.

North Interior Karnataka will feel the bite first and hardest: districts such as Belagavi, Bagalkote, Vijayapura, Kalaburagi, Bidar, Raichur, Ballari, Koppal and their neighbours are in the core of the 4–6°C-below-normal zone. Here, the cold does not just nip the nose; it creeps into poorly insulated homes, cattle sheds, and fields where standing crops and tender nursery beds are exposed. South Interior districts and the Malnad belt – Bengaluru Urban and Rural, Tumakuru, Chikkaballapur, Kolar, Mysuru, Mandya, Hassan, Chikkamagaluru, Shivamogga, Kodagu – are not far behind, with nights that will feel more like hill-station temperatures than the plateau winter residents are used to. From 14 to 16 December, even usually humid districts along the coast – Udupi, Dakshina Kannada, Uttara Kannada – will wake up to an unfamiliar chill.

Bengaluru, the city that sells itself as “pleasant all year,” will discover the darker side of that pleasantness. The forecast places the capital firmly in the band of significantly below-normal minimum temperatures, translating into sharp cold at dawn and after dusk. For IT corridors and gated communities, the response might be as simple as a thicker blanket or a late start to the morning walk. But for construction workers sleeping on site, pourakarmikas reporting before sunrise, street vendors, and thousands living in informal settlements, the same drop in temperature can mean hypothermia, worsening asthma, or an elderly person not waking up. This is where municipal responsibility meets citizen conscience: distributing blankets and hot beverages is not charity, it is urban public health.

The health message, however, is deceptively simple and stubbornly ignored until it is too late. The first law of surviving a cold wave is respect. Respect for the body’s warning signals, for the limitations of age and illness, for the silent toll of exposure. Authorities advise what common sense should have taught us: wear adequate winter clothing, preferably in layers, stay indoors as much as possible during peak cold hours, keep yourself dry, drink warm fluids, and look out for the very young and the very old. Shivering is not a minor inconvenience to be dismissed; it is the body’s first alarm that heat is being lost faster than it can be produced. The cultural temptation to “fight the cold” with a nightcap of alcohol is particularly dangerous – alcohol expands blood vessels, gives a false sense of warmth, and accelerates loss of core body temperature.

In extreme cold, the language of danger shifts from “cold” to “frostbite” and “hypothermia” – words more familiar from foreign films than from gram panchayat meetings in North Karnataka, yet now uncomfortably relevant. Frostbite begins silently, with numbness and pale or whitish skin over fingers, toes, ear lobes, or the nose. The correct response is gentle: warm, not scalding, water; dry, layered clothing; patience. The wrong response – rubbing, massaging, or exposing the area to direct intense heat – can cause deeper tissue damage. Hypothermia, the dangerous drop in core body temperature, demands even more urgency: move the person indoors, change wet clothes, wrap them in blankets, use skin-to-skin warmth if needed, offer warm non-alcoholic drinks, and do not hesitate to seek medical help. In remote villages, the first “primary health centre” may be the neighbour’s better-insulated house.

If the human body is the first battlefield, the farmer’s field is the second. A cold wave over an agricultural State is never just a weather story; it is an economic story written in wilting leaves and stunted pods. The advisory is unambiguous: apply light, frequent or evening sprinkler irrigation to protect crops from cold injury and ground frost. Water, judiciously used, can be a shield, forming a thin layer that releases heat as it freezes, buying a few crucial degrees for vulnerable plants. Young fruit trees deserve a kind of rural “blanketing” – Sarkanda, straw, polythene sheets, or gunny bags around their tender stems and crowns. Banana bunches, so central to the economy of many districts, are to be cloaked in porous polythene bags, a simple, low-cost intervention that can mean the difference between a marketable harvest and a field of loss.

Rice nurseries, the cradle of a coming season’s food security, need disciplined care: cover beds with polythene sheets at night, irrigate in the evening and drain in the morning, ensuring seedlings neither freeze nor remain waterlogged in frigid water. For sensitive rabi crops like mustard, rajma and gram in frost-prone tracts, agronomists recommend protective sprays – very dilute sulphuric acid at 0.1% or thiourea at 500 ppm – applied with precision and proper guidance. What farmers must not do is equally important: avoid heavy nutrient applications when roots are sluggish in the cold and abstain from unnecessary soil disturbance that breaks the insulating surface layer and increases heat loss from the ground. A cold wave is a test not only of resilience but of agronomic discipline.

Then there is the third frontline: cattle sheds and poultry houses. In a State where livestock is family wealth and security, letting cattle sleep in the open on a cold-wave night is not tradition; it is negligence. The veterinary guidance is clear: keep animals inside sheds at night, provide dry bedding, raise them off damp floors, and bump up the energy and protein in their ration with mineral mixtures, salt, grains, and modest amounts of jaggery. In poultry, young chicks in particular need artificial warmth and protection from drafts; a few hours of intense cold can wipe out weeks of investment. The don’ts are stark in their simplicity: no early-morning grazing when the ground is at its coldest, no night-time tethering in the open because “it has always been done this way.” Climate, unlike custom, does not respect nostalgia.

Underneath all these advisories runs a quieter, more hopeful thread. A cold wave, for all its risks, is also a reminder of our capacity for collective care. It forces families to sit together indoors, forces urban residents to notice the unhoused, forces administrations to think of weather not as a decorative section at the end of a bulletin but as a core governance issue. For Karnataka, this week’s chill can become an exercise in social warmth: Resident Welfare Associations in Bengaluru organising blanket drives; farmer groups sharing best practices on frost protection; gram panchayats identifying vulnerable elderly and ensuring they are not left alone on the coldest nights. The mercury will rise again after 16 December. What should remain is the memory of a State that met a stern winter not with indifference, but with intelligence, empathy, and a determination to lose no life – human or animal – to a preventable cold.