For every person killed by lightning, about nine more are struck and survive, often with life-changing injuries. And climate change is causing stormy weather and lightning more commonactivists like Daya believe the Indian government is failing to protect its citizens. “At a minimum, information about anything related to lightning should be disseminated at the local government level,” Daya says.
India has systems in place to predict perilous storms. They work by collecting a lot of precise data, says Sanjay Srivastava, chairman of the Climate Resilient Observing-Systems Promotion Council (CROPC), an intergovernmental institute that works to develop resilience to the effects of climate change. Srivastava is also the organizer of the Lightning Resilient India campaign.
“Detecting the exact location of a cloud-to-ground lightning strike is a computational mechanism that requires at least three devices,” Srivastava says. They are radio-frequency detectors, which detect radio waves produced by lightning; Doppler weather radar, which detects precipitation and wind patterns associated with storms that can produce lightning; and a lightning detector, a device specifically designed to detect electromagnetic signals produced by lightning strikes.
As of April 2022, India’s National Remote Sensing Centre has installed 46 lightning sensors across the country. Another institute, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, has 83. These, along with other private and institutional data, monitor and manage India’s lightning warning system.
The data shows that Jharkhand and other neighboring regions in eastern and central India are among the country’s scorching spots because this is where scorching, droughty air currents from the northwest meet humid easterly currents. As clouds meet warmer air, the humid air rises until it reaches subfreezing temperatures in the upper atmosphere, where it can freeze into ice particles called graupel. When these then collide with other ice particles, they generate stagnant electricity that can ultimately lead to lightning. Rising global temperatures They are growing this phenomenon.
Yet despite advances in meteorology, the full mechanisms of lightning’s generation and behavior remain partly shrouded in mystery. The exact triggers, the precise nature of lightning’s atmospheric propagation, and the factors that determine the intensity of each strike are still not fully understood. The risk to human life can only be predicted in fairly broad terms.
And while such early warning systems exist, their information often doesn’t reach people in time. So volunteers like Shankar work to inform people how to stay protected and teach them how to build easy-to-make lightning arresters—devices that neutralize cloud-to-ground lightning.
The day Shankar visited the Manjhis’ house, it was raining. On the way, he noticed farmers and locals taking shelter under trees. He stopped to inform them that standing under a tree during rain increased the risk of lightning strikes. But they said there was no other place they could take shelter.
Lightning casualties are more common in rural areas, where infrastructure is restricted. Concrete houses, which can have the protective effects of a Faraday cage, are less apparent there than in cities, while statuesque vegetation, under which workers can take shelter, can attract strikes. Densely populated areas in storm-prone regions also see more casualties. “We can say that there are two factors behind lightning casualties. There are many environmental factors, and then there are socioeconomic factors,” says Anand Shankar, who works in the India Meteorological Department in the Ministry of Earth Sciences in Bihar state (Anand and Daya are not related).