As Heat Increases Lightning Strikes in India, Mobile Alerts are Saving Lives
But the country’s early warning systems for natural disasters are yet to bridge the digital divide.
This article originally appeared on Earth Island Journal. Subscribe to their newsletter here.
“It was a jarring sound, like an alarm that you cannot miss,” says Rajagopala Reddy, a 71-year-old farmer from Velkur village in the coastal state of Andhra Pradesh in southern India. The sound was from his phone, a text message alerting him of an elevated chance for a lightning strike in his district.
The text from the state’s disaster management agency was delivered in Telugu, Andhra Pradesh’s vernacular language and the only language Reddy can read. He heeded the message and skipped going to the farm that evening in March 2025. Later, a lightning strike burned a coconut tree on his land — the same tree he usually sat under while his cattle grazed nearby.
“I still thank my stars for that text,” Reddy says. “Had it been in English or if there was no alarm-like buzz, I wouldn’t have read it.”
Across India, there has been a steep rise in lightning deaths in recent years. In Reddy’s state, in the southern part of the country, lightning deaths have increased from 75 in 2020 to 95 in 2025, according to data shared with Earth Island Journal by the state’s disaster-management department. In 2025, India saw a staggering 184-percent rise in lightning-related deaths compared with 2024. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, which collates all unusual deaths, lightning strikes are now responsible for 35 to 40 percent of all natural-disaster deaths in the country every year.
Over the past decade, as global temperatures have continued to rise, lightning has emerged as a major yet frequently underestimated meteorological hazard in tropical regions of the world, and southern India, which lies south of the Tropic of Cancer, is bearing a significant brunt of this phenomenon. A 2025 study in the journal Remote Sensing Letters points out that the coastal state of Odisha, which lies east of Andhra Pradesh, has one of the highest incidences of lightning-related deaths globally.
Another study, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics in 2021, says that “lightning frequency and intensity values across the Indian region are expected to increase 10-25 percent and 15-50 percent, respectively, by the end of the century with the highest risk along the coasts assuming the highly ambitious carbon emission RCP 8.5 scenario.”
Put simply, atmospheric heat is a major factor behind the rise. “Lightning does increase with temperatures,” says Rohit Chakraborty, a research assistant professor at the SRM Institute of Science and Technology and one of the authors of the study. India’s annual mean temperature has risen significantly over the past century, at a rate of 0.68 degrees Celsius per 100 years between 1901 and 2024, according to the India Meteorological Department.
“Higher temperatures increase the moisture-holding capacity of the region roughly 6.5-7 percent per 1 degree Celsius by the Clausius-Clapeyron equation,” Chakraborty says. (The Clausius-Clapeyron equation explains how warmer air can hold more moisture, which is why rising temperatures can lead to heavier rainfall and stronger thunderstorms.)
Research also indicates that lightning-strike frequency can increase after a pronounced heat wave ends. “The ending phase of the heat waves in coastal regions should be characterized by low-pressure areas and hence moisture convergence. Also due to extreme heat, the air will be unstable, so chances of lightning are really high,” Chakraborty says.
To protect its citizens from this growing threat, Indian states are turning to digital technologies — from sending out severe weather warnings via text messages and drones to mapping lightning-prone regions and creating public awareness through mobile apps. But while these efforts are a move in the right direction, these early warning systems are yet to scale up in terms of bridging the digital divide and reaching all communities living in the country’s high-risk zones for lightning strikes.
India's Management Authority disseminates disaster warnings through SACHET, a Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)-based integrated alert system that sends SMS and mobile alerts for natural hazards.
Since smartphone and internet access in rural India remains limited but most small-scale farmers, fishers, and villagers tend to own basic mobile phones, these alerts are designed to reach all mobile phones. And they are helping keep farmers like Reddy safe from lightning strikes.
TK Two images and captions
Between when SACHET was launched in 2023 and May 2026, the system had been used to send out 134 billion SMS text alerts in 19 Indian languages during natural disasters. The system covers hazards including lightning, heat waves, floods, cyclones, earthquakes, and landslides.
In 2025, 40 million lightning alerts were disseminated across India, says Sanjay Srivastava, chairman of the national Climate Resilient Observing Systems Promotion Council. The council acts as an interface between India’s weather forecasting arm, the India Meteorological Department, and other agencies, both government (including state disaster-management authorities, agriculture departments, and state public relations departments) and nonprofits working in climate-vulnerable regions, to enhance the reach of the India Meteorological Department’s forecasts.
Besides text alerts, smartphone apps such as SACHET and Damini let users check the status of lightning in their locality. But people using basic or “dumb” phones cannot access these apps, and together they had only 3.3 million downloads in 2025.
“Applications are mainly for people who are smartphone-savvy,” Srivastava says.
Because internet access remains uneven across India, local and national weather and disaster-management agencies continue to see text-based alerts as a critical way to reach people during emergencies. In fact, India is doubling down by experimenting with a new cellular broadcast technology that allows alerts to override silent and do-not-disturb settings in the phones. The new alerts produce the same sound Reddy heard on his dumb phone, but in a more advanced form that also reads out the message in a vernacular language, helping even those who are not literate.
The India Meteorological Department sends lightning alerts with a lead time of three hours to disaster-management departments in all states. The disaster-management department plots the alert data on a map, which pinpoints the specific administrative area — or mandal — where lightning is expected. “We send out text messages first as they have the biggest impact,” says Prakhar Jain, managing director of the Andhra Pradesh State Disaster Management Authority, adding that the local alerts are sent about 30 minutes before lightning is expected.
The text alerts are effective, but not perfect, say senior officials working with the National Disaster Management Authority, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Text-message dissemination can get delayed in areas where mobile towers are heavily congested due to high user density,” an official who didn’t want to be named told Earth Island Journal.
Accuracy is also a problem. “There is a high false-alarm ratio and sometimes we get the alerts after the lightning strike,” says Manoranjan Mishra, a professor of geography at Fakir Mohan University in Odisha and lead author of a 2025 study looking at lightning strikes in Odisha. Mishra’s study found that “the majority of lightning-related deaths [in Odisha] occur during the second half of the day (1 p.m. to 7 p.m.), when outdoor exposure is at its peak and forecast accuracy and lead time may be limited.” The study reinforces the critical role of implementing safety guidelines for those engaged in outdoor occupations and the need to develop timely and precise monitoring and alert systems, especially during periods of elevated lightning activity.
In Odisha and the adjacent Jharkhand state, which Srivastava describes as India’s “lightning rods” because of their high lightning activity, governments have become increasingly proactive in issuing alerts. Yet several factors continue to drive lightning deaths.
“Many tribal families live in kachcha (mud) houses that do not provide adequate protection during lightning strikes,” Srivastava says. If the house is struck, those inside could be injured or killed.
In states such as Jharkhand, where a significant population lives in remote rural areas and does not wn mobile phones, “dumb” or otherwise, the state government is using drones fitted with loudspeakers to issue the alerts. Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh also have stronger public education and outreach efforts around lightning safety, including printed materials distributed at schools and community events.
Srivastava believes that education and preparedness for lightning strikes must happen in individual villages and district subdivisions to be truly effective and reach the right people. “Awareness programs should also be conducted in stadiums and other public spaces,” he says. “People will not mind spending two minutes learning how to stay safe.”
