India’s climate trajectory is entering a far more dangerous phase, according to consolidated national climate data for 2025, which places the year among the warmest on record while revealing a sharp rise in deadly extreme weather events across the country. Climate experts warn that the signals are no longer gradual or ambiguous but are accelerating at a pace that challenges existing preparedness and response systems.
In 2025, India’s annual mean land surface air temperature stood 0.28 degrees Celsius above the 1991–2020 average, ranking it as the eighth warmest year since systematic records began in 1901. The data reinforces a troubling long-term trend, with ten of the fifteen warmest years recorded since 2011. The decade spanning 2016 to 2025 has now officially been confirmed as the warmest in India’s recorded climate history.
Climate analysts caution that this sustained warming reflects a structural shift rather than a temporary anomaly. They note that the country is increasingly experiencing compounded climate risks, where rising temperatures interact with erratic rainfall and extreme events to amplify impacts on lives and livelihoods.
The most pronounced temperature anomalies were recorded during the winter months. January and February 2025 together registered a winter temperature anomaly of 1.17 degrees Celsius above normal, the highest ever recorded for the season in India. February emerged as the warmest February on record, while January ranked as the second warmest since 1901, disrupting traditional seasonal patterns across much of the country.
Rainfall trends during the year were equally volatile. India received 110 percent of its long-period average rainfall in 2025, but this overall surplus masked deep regional and temporal imbalances. May recorded its highest rainfall since 1901, while the southwest monsoon arrived eight days earlier than normal. Central and western India experienced excess rainfall, while parts of the northeastern region faced persistent deficits, underscoring growing spatial unevenness in precipitation.
Such variability, experts say, highlights the increasing complexity of India’s climate system and exposes the limitations of conventional forecasting approaches that rely on historical patterns.
Cyclonic activity over the North Indian Ocean was classified as “normal” in terms of storm count, with four cyclonic storms forming during the post-monsoon season. However, meteorologists noted an unusually high number of depressions during the year. Eleven depressions formed in 2025, nearly double the climatological average, signalling heightened atmospheric instability.
Two cyclonic systems — Cyclone Montha and Cyclone Ditwah — caused loss of life and infrastructure damage within India. Beyond national borders, Cyclone Ditwah and Cyclone Senyar triggered catastrophic flooding across Sri Lanka and parts of Southeast Asia, affecting millions and highlighting the transboundary nature of climate risks in the region.
The human toll of extreme weather in India continued to climb. Disaster management records and media reports indicate that approximately 2,760 people lost their lives to extreme weather events in 2025. Floods, landslides, cloudbursts and heavy rainfall accounted for more than 1,370 deaths, while lightning and thunderstorms claimed over 1,310 lives. Heat waves, cold waves, hailstorms and dust storms added to the burden, affecting nearly every region of the country.
States including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Bihar and Himalayan regions reported particularly high casualty figures. Officials note that many fatalities resulted from short-duration, high-intensity events such as lightning strikes and flash floods triggered by cloudbursts, reflecting a shift towards hyper-local climate extremes.
For technology developers, climate startups and infrastructure planners, the 2025 data signals a clear shift in the nature of India’s climate challenge. Experts increasingly describe it as a systems-level engineering problem that demands integrated technological solutions rather than isolated interventions.
Opportunities are emerging in areas such as artificial intelligence-driven weather forecasting and nowcasting, satellite- and IoT-enabled early-warning systems, climate risk analytics for agriculture, insurance and urban planning, and digital platforms for disaster response. Technologies designed to improve resilience to heat stress, flooding and lightning are also gaining urgency.
Climate experts warn that the gap between climate risk signals and on-ground preparedness is widening rapidly. Without accelerated investment in climate data infrastructure and real-time risk intelligence, the impacts of future extreme events are likely to intensify.
Policymakers, technologists and investors are being urged to move beyond reactive disaster response models and adopt predictive, preventive approaches. This includes scaling up climate observation networks, embedding climate intelligence into public decision-making systems, and investing in locally adaptive, technology-enabled resilience measures.
As temperature records continue to fall and extreme weather events grow more frequent and intense, experts stress that India’s climate future is no longer theoretical. It is already measurable, operational and unfolding in real time. The defining question, they argue, is whether technological and institutional responses can move fast enough to protect lives and livelihoods in an increasingly climate-intense world.