Accidental Deaths in India - Part 1
Death by Forces of Nature
The recent landlides in Kerala have highlighted the devastating effects of natural disasters and how often we find ourselves unprepared. The death toll as I write this (on 04th Aug 2024) have reached 360, with 206 people still reported missing.
In 2022, natural forces led to 8,060 deaths in India —each number representing a real person, a real life lost.
While this figure represents only about 2% of all accidental deaths, it’s crucial to acknowledge that these tragedies are significant. The remaining 98% of accidental deaths are attributable to human negligence, errors or in some way affected by actions of humans. (It is a topic for a future post)
The below visualization delves into this critical 2% — examining the distribution of natural disaster-related deaths across different states and identifying the primary causes.
Of these 8060 deaths in 2022, it is interesting to see that a significant ~36% can be attributed to deaths caused by lightening, making you wonder if there are any easy measures that can be taken to prevent this. The other large cause is attributed to “Other causes” in the dataset. As of now, I do not know what are all the causes that get classified under this.
So these 2 categories in effect constituted about 75% of all deaths caused by natural causes in 2022.
A deep dive to look into how these numbers vary over states and what are the major causes per state follows.
The data used for these visualizations are available from the Open Government Data Platform - Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India (ADSI) - 2022
There are other parameters such as age range and gender based where you can check on how these numbers vary.