Disaster Risk and
Heat Resilience 101

The last clause carries the idea that runs through this course. A cyclone over an empty sea is weather. The same cyclone over villages of thatched houses, with no shelter and no warning, is a disaster. The wind is the same in both cases. What differs is who is in its path and what they have to protect themselves with. The 2025 amendment added an Explanation to s. 2(d) saying that man made causes do not include law and order situations.

Disaster risk practice therefore separates three things that are often run together in news reports and in project documents. The hazard is the physical event. Exposure is the people and assets in the place where it happens. Vulnerability is the set of conditions that decide how badly those people and assets are hurt. Each one can be changed by a different kind of action, and a programme that does not say which one it is working on usually cannot show that it worked.

Risk analysts write disaster risk as a product: risk = hazard × exposure × vulnerability. The Sixteenth Finance Commission built its Disaster Risk Index for allocating money to States on exactly this rule, and explained why. Disaster risk only exists when hazard, exposure and vulnerability intersect. A severe hazard over an empty place carries no risk to people. A large, poor population in a place no hazard reaches carries none either.

The product form has a practical consequence. If any one term falls towards zero, risk falls towards zero, whatever the other two are doing. Moving a village out of a floodplain cuts exposure. Building a cyclone shelter and warning people in time cuts vulnerability for the hours that matter. Neither changes the hazard.

The hazard is identical. Exposure is higher in B because of where the houses stand. Vulnerability is higher in B because of what the houses are made of, who lives in them, and who the warning and transport systems were designed for. The loss in B will be measured in lives. The loss in A will be measured in crops and roofs.

Disaster risk practice used to plan for one hazard at a time. Recent events in South Asia rarely arrive alone. Pakistan's 2022 floods combined torrential rain, riverine, urban and flash flooding, accelerated glacial melt and landslides. About 33 million people were affected, one in seven Pakistanis, and nearly 8 million were displaced (Government of Pakistan et al., Pakistan Floods 2022 Post-Disaster Needs Assessment).

Heat and drought reinforce each other: hot days dry soil faster, and dry soil heats faster. A cyclone in the middle of a pandemic forces shelters to choose between crowding and distancing. A flood that destroys a primary health centre removes the place where heatstroke cases would have been treated the following summer.

These questions come before any discussion of law or money, because the law and the money follow from the answers. A district plan that cannot answer them is a list of departments and phone numbers. A plan that can answer them tells an officer where to send the boat first.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 was adopted on 18 March 2015 at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, and endorsed by the UN General Assembly. It replaced the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015, and was the outcome of consultations that began in March 2012 and intergovernmental negotiations from July 2014 to March 2015.

It is a voluntary agreement that creates no binding obligations. Countries report against 38 global indicators through the online Sendai Framework Monitor, and UNDRR is charged with supporting implementation, follow-up and review. It sits alongside the Paris Agreement, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Read the goal as three instructions. Preventing new risk means not building the next school on the floodplain. Reducing existing risk means retrofitting the school that is already there. Strengthening resilience means preparing to respond and recover when the remaining risk becomes a disaster.

The first instruction is the cheapest and the most often ignored. Most risk in fast-growing South Asian cities is being created now, by where housing, roads and industry are built. A framework that only funds response will keep paying for risk that planning decisions made yesterday.

The fourth priority contains the phrase that became a slogan, Build Back Better. UNDRR describes recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction as a critical opportunity to integrate risk reduction into development. In practice that means a house rebuilt after a cyclone should be able to withstand the next one, and a school rebuilt after a flood should be on a plinth.

Paragraph 7 says governments should engage women, children and youth, persons with disabilities, poor people, migrants, indigenous peoples, volunteers, practitioners and older persons in designing and implementing policies, plans and standards.

Paragraph 36 goes further. It says persons with disabilities and their organisations are critical in assessing disaster risk and in designing plans tailored to specific requirements, taking into account universal design. It says older persons should be included in designing policies and early warning, and that migrants contribute to the resilience of communities and their knowledge can be useful in designing disaster risk reduction. Paragraph 27(h) asks that local authorities be given the regulatory and financial means to work with civil society, communities, indigenous peoples and migrants.

UNDRR's Sendai Framework Monitor captures progress that member states report themselves against 38 indicators. A sub-system, DesInventar Sendai, lets countries build disaster loss databases to collect the data for targets (a) to (d): deaths, affected people, economic loss and damage to infrastructure.

Self-reporting is the framework's weakness. A country that records few heat deaths will appear to be meeting target (a) on heat whatever is actually happening. Loss databases are only as complete as the death certificates, revenue records and damage surveys that feed them.

Section 25 requires every State to establish a DDMA for every district. Its members are the Collector as chair, the elected representative of the local authority as co-chair, the chief executive officer of the DDMA, the Superintendent of Police, the Chief Medical Officer and up to two other members. Since 2025 those two may be district officers, disaster management experts or people from civil society organisations (s. 25(2)(f), as substituted). Where a zila parishad exists, its chairperson is co-chair. In Sixth Schedule tribal areas the Chief Executive Member of the autonomous district council is co-chair.

The DDMA prepares the district disaster management plan, coordinates departments, and monitors whether local authorities comply. The Sixteenth Finance Commission calls DDMAs the critical hubs for planning, coordination and implementation, and notes that local authorities, including panchayats, municipalities and autonomous district councils, are responsible for their own plans and for relief and reconstruction in their areas (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), paras 11.7, 11.8, 11.14).

Cities had been planned for through district plans drawn for mostly rural districts. Urban flooding, heat islands, building collapse and fire behave differently, and the municipal corporation controls drains, building permits and street-level services. Placing the authority with the Municipal Commissioner puts it with the body that controls those levers. The Act says a State may create these authorities. It does not require them.

Many States had already raised such forces before the amendment gave them a legal basis. Odisha created the Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force after the 1999 super cyclone and had 10 units by 2019 (Government of Odisha, Cyclone Fani Damage, Loss and Needs Assessment (2019), ch. 15). The Sixteenth Finance Commission describes State forces as an important first line of defence alongside the NDRF (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), para 11.15).

In the 2005 Act the minimum standards sat in s. 12, which said the guidelines shall include those items. The 2025 amendment omitted ss. 12, 13 and 19 and moved the standards into the functions of the NDMA and SDMAs, where the list may include them. Section 13, also omitted, had let the NDMA recommend relief in loan repayment.

The amendment also deleted the words compensation and from s. 61. Before 2025 the ban on discrimination covered compensation and relief. It now names relief only. The list of grounds does not include disability, age or migrant status, so those groups rely on the general law and on the plans.

Jos Chathukulam's EPW commentary argues that most of the 2025 amendment strengthens a centralised, top-down approach. His points are that the new staffing and regulation powers of the NDMA, the statutory status of the NCMC and HLC, and the removal of the specified purposes for which the National Disaster Response Fund may be used all concentrate authority, that local governments are given no larger role, and that the amendment contains no comprehensive provisions for pandemics or for the particular vulnerability of women, persons with disabilities and marginalised groups.

The government's case for the amendment rests on clarity and data: definitions aligned with Sendai, plans prepared by the Authorities themselves, a national and State disaster database, preparedness assessments and post-disaster audits. Both readings can be true at once. A database and an audit power are useful tools, and who controls them decides whom they serve.

The Act provided mitigation funds from 2005. They existed on paper only until the Fifteenth Finance Commission recommended they be constituted with real money. As a result, the Sixteenth Finance Commission reports that all the funds envisaged under the Act have been constituted by all the States and the Union, except the district funds (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), para 11.1).

Money flows in through the Finance Commission. Each Commission recommends how much goes into the State funds for its five-year award period, how it is split between the Union and the States, and how it is shared among States.

Each State's allocation is 70 per cent based on its average past expenditure on disasters from 2011-12 to 2023-24, leaving out the COVID-19 years 2020-21 and 2021-22, and 30 per cent based on its score on the Disaster Risk Index. The base year allocation rises by 5 per cent a year.

The risk index multiplies a hazard score across ten disasters, an exposure score from projected population, and a vulnerability score from per-capita income. Expenditure data come from the major head 2245 accounts of each State, adjusted to remove transfers between funds and releases from the national fund.

The Fani assessment, led by the Government of Odisha with the UN, World Bank and Asian Development Bank, records that of 1,019 cyclonic disturbances in the Indian subcontinent in the last century, 890 were on the eastern coast, and 260 of those made landfall on the Odisha coast. Odisha has ten major river systems that flood regularly, and is also exposed to flash floods, landslides, earthquakes and tsunami.

The state is poor and rural. In 2011, 83 per cent of its 4.2 crore people lived in rural areas, Scheduled Tribes were 22.8 per cent and Scheduled Castes 17.1 per cent of the population, and poverty, though it fell from about 57 per cent in 2004-05 to about 33 per cent in 2011-12, remained well above the national average of about 22 per cent. That combination of high hazard and high vulnerability is what makes its fall in cyclone deaths instructive.

The super cyclone of October 1999 killed nearly 10,000 people in Odisha, in the figure the state's own assessment uses. In its immediate aftermath the government set up the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority as an autonomous organisation, before the national Act existed. It also raised the Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force, a trained and equipped state rescue force.

Over the next two decades Odisha built multipurpose cyclone shelters with community task forces linked to each one, an Early Warning Dissemination System with five layers of communication and sirens on the coast, District Emergency Operation Centres in all 30 districts, a GIS cell, a drought monitoring cell and a lightning detection system. The statutory SDMA under the 2005 Act was constituted in 2010, with the Chief Minister as chair and the Special Relief Commissioner's office as its secretariat. Through the national Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project, Odisha strengthened its last-mile warning system and built and maintained multipurpose cyclone shelters.

These are the state government's own findings, in a report it led with the UN, the World Bank and the ADB. They show that a system which saves lives can still distribute shelter and relief unequally. Women, people with disabilities and other socially and economically vulnerable groups were, in the report's words, severely affected despite the evacuation.

Floods accounted for 55.09 per cent of what States spent on notified disasters from 2019-20 to 2023-24, far more than any other hazard (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), Figure 11.5). They are frequent, they cover large areas, and most of their cost is in lost crops, damaged houses and broken roads. Deaths are a smaller part.

Flood risk has four sources that call for different responses. Riverine floods build over days and can be forecast from upstream gauges. Flash floods and cloudbursts in the hills give minutes of warning. Urban floods happen when drains cannot carry heavy rain, and are made worse by building over lakes and channels. Coastal floods come with cyclone surge.

An embankment keeps a river out of the land behind it up to its design height. When the river exceeds that height, or the embankment breaches, the water arrives suddenly into places that people had come to believe were safe. Embankments also stop silt from spreading over the floodplain, so the river bed rises between the walls over the years and the river sits higher than the land around it.

This is why flood planners in India distinguish structural measures (embankments, dams, channels) from non-structural ones (zoning, warning, insurance, raised houses, flood-tolerant crops). The Sixteenth Commission records that States have used SDMF for flood protection walls, dam restoration, drains and groundwater recharge (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), para 11.38).

Landslides took 2.59 per cent of State disaster spending from 2019-20 to 2023-24, and cloudbursts 0.32 per cent (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), Figure 11.5). Those shares are small because the hill States are small. For the people of the Himalayan and north-eastern States and the Western Ghats, landslides cut roads for weeks and can bury a settlement in minutes.

Landslide risk is raised by rain, by cutting slopes for roads and buildings, by removing vegetation, and by blocking natural drainage. Most landslide warning in practice uses rainfall thresholds: when accumulated rain passes a level known to trigger slides on a slope, people below are moved.

NCRB data, as quoted by the Sixteenth Finance Commission, show lightning as the leading cause of death from forces of nature in India. In 2022 it accounted for 2,887 of 8,060 deaths, or 35.8 per cent. The Annual Lightning Report prepared with IMD for 2020-21 recorded about 18.5 million lightning strikes, a 34 per cent rise on the previous year.

The Commission notes who dies. Agricultural labourers working in open fields, with no shelter and near water, face the highest risk, and people living in mud houses are more exposed to ground strikes. Sixteen States had notified lightning as a State-specific disaster when the Commission reported, and it recommended adding lightning to the national list (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), paras 11.69 to 11.73).

The same five questions work for a programme officer in an NGO and for a block development officer. They turn a general concern about floods into a short list of records to ask for and people to visit.

The categories matter because they arrive in sequence. Rain fails first. Soil dries and crops fail weeks later. Wells and tanks fail months later. People migrate, sell animals and borrow throughout. A declaration based only on rainfall comes early and may miss a district where rain was near normal but badly timed. A declaration that waits for crop-cutting results comes late, after people have already sold their assets.

Drought is on the national list of notified disasters, and took 17.26 per cent of State disaster expenditure from 2019-20 to 2023-24, second only to floods (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), para 11.65, Figure 11.5). Relief spending as a whole is dominated by agricultural input subsidy, at 55.6 per cent after removing COVID-19 spending, and drought is where most of that subsidy is paid.

The Fifteenth Commission earmarked ₹1,200 crore in the national mitigation fund for catalytic assistance to the twelve most drought-prone States. By 31 July 2025, ₹350 crore had been released (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), Table 11.2). For agricultural disasters, the Inter-Ministerial Group that scrutinises a State's request for central assistance is chaired by the Secretary, Agriculture. For other disasters it is the Union Home Secretary (para 11.11).

Rural employment guarantees have been India's main drought response for landless households. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 was repealed from 1 July 2026, when the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act 2025 came into force, by Ministry of Rural Development notification of 11 May 2026 (SCC Online, 12 May 2026).

The new Act guarantees not less than 125 days of employment a year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work (s. 5(1)). It also requires States to notify sixty days a year covering peak sowing and harvesting, during which no work is undertaken (s. 6). In a drought year the notified peak season may produce little farm work, which is something to watch.

A drought declaration by a State government opens access to relief norms, central assistance and scheme relaxations. The timing and the unit of declaration, usually a block or tehsil, decide who gets help. A village in a block that is not declared gets nothing, however badly its own crops failed.

Declarations rely on a mix of rainfall, crop sowing, vegetation, soil moisture and water indicators, followed by field verification. The Union Agriculture Ministry publishes the procedure that States are expected to follow. Practitioners should read the current version of that procedure before advising a State, because its indicators and thresholds have been revised over time.

Each of these indicators moves before crop-cutting results are in. Taken together they show whether a drought response is reaching people, which input subsidy payments alone cannot.

The IMD definition is based on dry air temperature. It says nothing about humidity, and it requires the heat to be widespread enough to be met at two stations for two days. That is right for a weather service. It is a blunt tool for health, because people die at lower temperatures where it is humid, where nights stay hot, and where people are not used to the heat.

The Sixteenth Finance Commission records that the frequency and intensity of hot days in India increased significantly over 1981 to 2022, with major heatwaves in 2013, 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2024, and a marked rise in very warm nights in the last decade. It explains why nights matter: warm nights stop the body recovering from daytime heat, which raises the risk of heat illness such as heatstroke (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), paras 11.66, 11.67).

CPR's review of heat action plans adds that three-day runs of concurrent hot days and hot nights increased significantly over 1951 to 2016, and are projected to increase two to four times by 2050 under moderate and high emission scenarios (Pillai and Dalal, How is India Adapting to Heatwaves?, CPR (March 2023), citing published projections).

Sherwood and Huber argued in 2010 that a wet-bulb temperature above 35°C for an extended period would cause hyperthermia in humans, because metabolic heat could no longer be lost, and noted that observed peak wet-bulb temperatures then did not exceed 31°C (PNAS 107(21):9552, 2010).

Vecellio and colleagues tested the idea on young, healthy volunteers in a chamber. In humid conditions the critical wet-bulb temperature at which heat stress became uncompensable averaged 30.55°C, well below 35°C, and no subject reached 35°C. In hot, dry conditions it was lower still (J Appl Physiol 132(2):340, 2022).

Warnings travel along the lines of ordinary inequality. Phones are more often owned and controlled by men. People who are deaf or blind need warnings in forms they can receive. Migrant workers may not speak the local language and are often not registered in the village. People working in fields hear sirens but not SMS. Older people living alone may hear the warning and have no one to help them move.

Odisha's Collectors were told on 1 May 2019 to identify all vulnerable people and move them, with special care for older people, physically challenged people, women and children (Government of Odisha, Cyclone Fani Damage, Loss and Needs Assessment (2019), ch. 15). An instruction like that works only if a list of those people, by village, already exists.

Most disaster finance waits for damage to be assessed. Anticipatory action reverses the order: decide in advance what will be done and who pays, then act on the forecast. The cost is that sometimes the hazard is weaker than forecast and the money is spent on a disaster that did not happen.

Every warning system trades two errors. A low threshold gives more false alarms: people leave homes, lose wages and come back to find nothing happened. A high threshold gives more missed events: people stay home and the hazard arrives. After a few false alarms people stop leaving, so the second error starts to follow from the first.

Fani's forecast track was revised nine times while the storm meandered over the Bay of Bengal, and Odisha was expected to be spared in the early days (Government of Odisha, Cyclone Fani Damage, Loss and Needs Assessment (2019), ch. 15). The response was still timely because evacuation began only once landfall in Odisha was confirmed, with enough lead time left to move people.

Relief is fast, visible and mostly paid by the State response fund. Recovery is slow, harder to see and easy to underfund. Under the Fifteenth Commission's national fund, the Response and Relief window had released ₹14,855 crore of its ₹27,385 crore by 31 July 2025, while the Recovery and Reconstruction window had released ₹818.74 crore of ₹20,539 crore (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), Table 11.1).

Recovery decides whether a household returns to where it was. A family that has sold its livestock, taken a high-interest loan and pulled a child out of school may be counted as relieved and still be poorer for a decade.

The December 2004 tsunami killed at least 10,273 people in India, 8,010 of them in Tamil Nadu, and displaced at least 6,47,556 into emergency shelters. Human Rights Watch reported consistent accounts of caste discrimination in the distribution of aid. Fishing communities, who regard themselves as a higher caste, often blocked relief from reaching Dalits.

In one case a fishing community refused to share water provided by UNICEF and other relief organisations, claiming the Dalits would pollute it. A Dalit rights activist told HRW that relief materials could not be taken to Dalit areas because the fishing community refused to let them pass. Coastal farm labourers, sharecroppers and tenants, many of them Dalits, lost their crops and wages to seawater but were ignored in the first relief because they had suffered fewer deaths.

The government changed some policies when told of discrimination, and later assessed damage in Dalit communities and distributed rations to them. HRW's conclusion was that the greatest source of trouble was discrimination against Dalits by other victims of the tsunami, and that rooting it out required proactive measures from the government.

After the tsunami, Human Rights Watch found that women's access to aid was brokered through husbands, fathers or other male relatives, because ration cards, the main proof of identity and residence, were issued in the name of the male head of the household. Women complained that relief and compensation were distributed through male heads, and press reports described cash relief that did not reach families. Unmarried, widowed and divorced women were often absorbed into the households of relatives instead of being counted as independent households.

The government did not treat women from fishing communities as workers, although most cleaned, sold and processed fish before the tsunami. Vocational offers of basket weaving or sewing gave low, irregular income and reinforced stereotypes about women's work (Human Rights Watch, After the Deluge: India's Reconstruction Following the 2004 Tsunami (May 2005)).

Relief systems in India run on lists: ration cards, voter rolls, land records, panchayat household registers. A person who is not on the local list is invisible to relief. After Fani, the ₹2,000 cash transfer and 50 kg of rice went only to ration card holders, which excluded many migrants and brick kiln workers who were non-residents and were equally affected (Government of Odisha, Cyclone Fani Damage, Loss and Needs Assessment (2019)).

The new rural employment law contains a model provision. In a national calamity such as a flood, cyclone, tsunami or earthquake that dislocates rural people, adults from affected areas may register and get a job card from the Gram Panchayat or Programme Officer where they have temporarily relocated, apply for work there, and get lost cards reissued. Work done there counts towards the 125 days (VB-G RAM G Act 2025 (Act 36 of 2025), Schedule II, para 10).

Human Rights Watch noted after the tsunami that disasters hurt persons with existing disabilities disproportionately and create new disabilities among the injured. People lose assistive devices such as crutches, artificial limbs and hearing or visual aids, and their usual caregivers may be killed, injured or diverted to other tasks. It recommended that shelters, health centres, housing and schools rebuilt after the disaster be accessible (Human Rights Watch, After the Deluge: India's Reconstruction Following the 2004 Tsunami (May 2005)).

The Fani assessment found that people with disabilities were among the most affected despite the evacuation, and recommended supplying assistive devices and giving self-help groups of persons with disabilities better market links (Government of Odisha, Cyclone Fani Damage, Loss and Needs Assessment (2019)).

Disaster risk finance divides losses into layers by how often they happen and how large they are. Small, frequent losses are cheapest to absorb from savings, budgets and social protection. Medium losses are what State response funds are for. Rare, very large losses are where insurance, reinsurance and catastrophe bonds can move risk off the public budget.

India relies mostly on public funds. The Sixteenth Finance Commission found that insurance as a supplement to public disaster finance remains at a nascent stage, except for crop insurance, because of few products, low penetration, low awareness and high cost, and because governments prefer post-disaster payouts to buying cover in advance (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), para 11.88).

The Sixteenth Finance Commission describes PMFBY as the world's largest crop insurance scheme. The Union and State governments together pay 85 to 90 per cent of the premium. Even so, farmer penetration had reached 40 per cent over eight years. Of farmer applications enrolled in 2024-25, 6.5 per cent were from tenant farmers, 17.6 per cent from marginal farmers and 48 per cent from loanee farmers (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), para 11.89).

The Commission names technology-based assessment of crop losses and timely payment of claims as the keys to the scheme's future. For a disaster practitioner the enrolment figures are the warning: crop insurance protects people who have land and loans. Tenant farmers are a small share of enrolment and landless labourers are not covered at all.

Nagaland is the Sixteenth Commission's example. Its Disaster Risk Transfer Parametric Insurance Solution is described as the first initiative in India to insure an entire State against extreme rainfall, using automated weather stations to set triggers, in a partnership of the Nagaland SDMA, SBI General Insurance, Munich Re and GIC Re. The Commission calls it a success that remains isolated and limited in scale (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), para 11.90).

Shock-responsive social protection uses programmes that already exist to deliver help when a disaster strikes. A programme can pay more to people already enrolled (vertical expansion), add affected people who were not enrolled (horizontal expansion), relax its rules for a time, or lend its payment system and lists to a relief operation. Each route is faster than building a new relief scheme after the event.

Pakistan's 2022 response used a flood relief cash transfer that gave PKR 25,000 to 1.1 million targeted households to meet emergency needs (Government of Pakistan et al., Pakistan Floods 2022 Post-Disaster Needs Assessment, ch. 3). After Fani, Odisha paid ₹2,000 and 50 kg of rice to ration card holders, and the assessment recommended advance payment of social security entitlements and cash for work (Government of Odisha, Cyclone Fani Damage, Loss and Needs Assessment (2019)).

Preparedness is hard to evaluate because its success is a disaster that did less harm than it would have. The 2025 amendment gives NDMA two new evaluation powers: to undertake disaster preparedness assessments of each State periodically, and to undertake post-disaster audits of a State's preparedness and response after a severe disaster (Disaster Management (Amendment) Act 2025 (Act 10 of 2025), Gazette of India, 29 March 2025, s. 6(2)(t), (u)). States must maintain disaster databases that feed a national one (s. 18(2)(p), s. 6(2)(v)).

The Sixteenth Finance Commission recommended turning the MHA's National Disaster Management Information System into a comprehensive system for the Union and the States, capturing real-time, transaction-level disaster data as a single source of disaster information (Report of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, Vol. I, ch. 11 (November 2025), Summary (ix)).