From mid April and advancing into May, India and Pakistan experienced extremely high temperatures, including daily maximum temperatures above 46°C in many cities in India ( Times of India, 2026). This ongoing period of extreme heat brought severe human and economic impacts across India and Pakistan ( Al Jazeera, 2026), two of the most densely populated regions in the world, exposing hundreds of millions of people to dangerous conditions. At least 37 heat-related deaths were reported in India ( The Wire, 2026), while ten deaths were recorded in Karachi, Pakistan ( Tribune, 2026). The event also drove record-high electricity demand across India as cooling needs surged (T he Wire, 2026), while agricultural drought conditions affected over 1mio km ² ( GDACS, 2026), compounding risks to food production and livelihoods. Beyond these direct impacts, the heat coincided with major election periods in the region, raising concerns about voter safety, campaign disruptions, and broader pressures on public infrastructure and health systems ( The Times of India, 2026) while potentially taking attention away from the acute dangers of heat. According to the IPCC AR6, based on many studies, there is a well-established and robust link between anthropogenic climate change and the increasing frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme heat events in South Asia, making such episodes significantly more likely in today’s warmer climate ( Seneviratne et al., 2021). With World Weather Attribution, we have also undertaken several attribution studies on extreme heat events in India and South Asia, including May 2024, April 2023, March to May 2022 and May 2016 when temperatures of over 50°C were reached in Phalodi, Rajasthan. While the more recent studies have shown a strong increase in likelihood and intensity of extreme dry and humid heat in the region, the 2016 study did show smaller increases. The study, published in a peer-reviewed journal ( van Oldenborgh et al., 2018) concluded that “for the next decades we expect the trend due to global warming to continue but the surface cooling effect of aerosols to diminish as air quality controls are implemented”. A decade on, we perform a super-rapid attribution study that updates the 2022 attribution analysis, as this year’s heatwave affected broadly similar regions and reached a comparable spatial extent. We also examine how the likelihood and intensity of an event such as this one have changed in today’s climate as compared with the 2016 climate conditions, when a similarly severe heat event occurred in the region, against a backdrop of ENSO and widespread drought.