The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said that, in 2020, cold waves killed 76 times more lives than hot winds. The Department of Statistics said in ‘Part-1 of India’s Environmental Situation’ that in 2020, 152 deaths were recorded due to cold waves, while two people lost their lives due to hot winds.
People die to cold wave
In 2020, around 152 people died across India due to cold waves. This is a significant decrease from the number of 287 the previous year. The highest number of deaths was recorded in 2011 when 722 people died.
The IMD report noted that in 2020, the proportion of officially recorded hot winds that caused cold-wave deaths was the highest in 20 years. The country recorded 99 days of cold waves in 2020, downtoearth reported.
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Cold waves
The report shows that the number of cold-wave days has increased by about 2.7 times from 2017-to 2020. Cold waves killed more people between 1980 and 2018 than hot winds. The number of cold-wave days has been increasing every year since 2017. In 2018, the number of such days was 63, which increased by one and a half times to 103 in 2019.
The country recorded the lowest number of deaths due to hot winds in 2020 when the country was under a months-long lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. In 2011, about 60 times more people died from cold waves than from hot winds. According to the IMD, 722 people died due to cold waves while 12 people died due to hot winds.
As many as 10,933 Indians (an average of 781 per year) have died in the past 14 years – between 2001 and 2014 – from ‘cold and exposure’, an analysis of statistics on accidental deaths from of natural causes obtained from the Indian government’s Open Government Data (OGD) platform reveals.
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