For every person killed by lightning, about nine others are struck and survive, often with life-changing injuries. And with climate change, stormy weather and lightning Most commonActivists like Daya believe that the Indian government is failing to protect its population. “The bare minimum would be to disseminate information on everything related to lightning at the local government level,” says Daya.
India has systems in place to predict dangerous storms, which rely on collecting a large amount of accurate data, says Sanjay Srivastava, chairman of the Climate Resilient Observing Systems Promotion Council (CROPC), an intergovernmental institute working to build resilience to the impacts of climate change. Srivastava is also the coordinator of the Lightning Resilient India Campaign.
“Detecting the precise location of a cloud-to-ground lightning strike is a computational mechanism that requires a minimum of three devices,” Srivastava says. These are radio frequency detectors, to detect the radio waves produced by lightning; a Doppler weather radar, to detect precipitation and wind patterns associated with thunderstorms that can produce lightning; and a lightning detector, a device specifically designed to detect the electromagnetic signals produced by lightning.
As of April 2022, India’s National Remote Sensing Centre had 46 lightning detection sensors installed across the country. Another institute, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, has 83 installed. These, along with other private and institutional data, monitor and guide India’s lightning warning system.
Data shows that Jharkhand and other neighbouring regions in eastern and central India are among the country’s hotspots, as this is where warm, dry northwesterly air currents meet moist easterly currents. When clouds encounter warmer air, the moist air rises to reach the sub-zero temperatures of the upper atmosphere, where it can freeze into ice particles called hail. When these collide with other ice particles, they generate electrostatic charges, which can eventually trigger lightning. Rising global temperatures are increasing This phenomenon.
However, despite advances in meteorology, the full mechanisms underlying the formation and behaviour of lightning remain partly a mystery. The precise triggers, the exact nature of how lightning propagates through the atmosphere and the factors determining the intensity of each discharge are still not fully understood. The risk to human life can only be predicted in fairly general terms.
And even though these early warning systems do exist, the information they receive often doesn’t reach people in time. That’s why volunteers like Shankar work to inform people about how to stay safe and teach them how to build easy-to-make lightning rods, devices that neutralize cloud-to-ground lightning.
The day Shankar visited the Manjhis’ home, it was drizzling. On the way, he saw farmers and locals taking shelter under trees. He stopped to inform them that staying under a tree when it rains increases the chances of being struck by lightning. But they told him there was no other place they could take shelter.
Lightning casualties are most common in rural areas, where infrastructure is limited. Concrete houses, which can have protective Faraday cage effects, are less common there than in cities, while tall vegetation, under which workers can take shelter, can attract lightning. Densely populated areas in stormy regions also see more casualties. “We can say there are two factors behind lightning casualties. There are many environmental factors and then there are socio-economic factors,” says Anand Shankar, who works at the Indian Meteorological Department in the Ministry of Earth Sciences in Bihar state (Anand and Daya are not related).
