Eleven people die of sunstroke near Mumbai after open-air award function

MUMBAI (Reuters) – At least eleven people died on Sunday after suffering from sunstroke at an event attended by India’s home minister on the outskirts of Mumbai, the chief minister of Maharashtra state said.

Hundreds of thousands of people attended an award function on Sunday afternoon where federal home minister Amit Shah presented an award to a well-known social activist, on the outskirts of the country’s financial capital of Mumbai in Maharashtra.

The event was held outdoors in the afternoon in Khargar, where the maximum temperature recorded was 38 degrees Celsius (100.4°F), normal for this time of the year.

Around 50 people were admitted to hospital after the event and 11 had died, Maharashtra’s chief minister, Eknath Shinde, told reporters late on Sunday night.

India is likely to experience heat waves between March and May, the weather office said in February this year.

(Reporting by Shilpa Jamkhandikar and Rajendra Jadhav in Mumbai; Editing by Sonali Paul)