Lightning claimed 264 lives from Feb.-May 17

Among natural disasters, lightning is the biggest killer in India, government records have shown

Obscured by the COVID-19 pandemic, lightning strikes have claimed 264 lives from February-May 17. Uttar Pradesh leads the list of such casualties with 100 deaths, followed by Bihar and Jharkhand with 58 and 31 deaths respectively.

Among natural disasters, lightning is the biggest killer in India, government records have shown.

February-May showed an increase, with so far, April accounting for the maximum deaths at 100.

There were already 3 million strikes from February- April this year with the most in Uttar Pradesh, followed by Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar and coastal India, according to data maintained by Climate Resilient Observing-Systems Promotion Council (CROPC), an independent research organisation. April and May last year saw 299 deaths from lightning in India, according to the the organisation.

Last April, Western Disturbances (WD) induced lightning and thunderstorms caused havoc in central and western India . India Meteorological Department(IMD) had issued specific warning 48 hours in advance and there were 41,000 strikes recorded by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, said Sanjay Srivastava, Chairman, CROPC. “Data on recent lightning strikes in West Bengal during cyclone Amphan are still being collected. There is better forecast by the IMD on the probability of lightning strikes but getting the message to people, especially in remote villages, is a challenge.”

Lightning activity increased with the advent of the monsoon and generally, the maximum instances of strikes—and deaths—tend to occur in June-July.

In 2019, an analysis by private weather forecaster, Skymet, of lightning strikes in India found that five States accounted for half of the lightning strikes in 2019, led by Odisha, with 9,37,462 or about 16% of the cloud-to-ground strikes.

There were 20 million lightning strikes in that period, with 72% of them being instances of ‘in-cloud’ lightning.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 8,684 deaths in the country due to causes “attributable to forces of nature” during 2016—the most updated such data available. Of them, 38.2% deaths were due to “lightning”, 15.4% to “heat and sun stroke” and 8.9% due to “floods”.