India's official toll from floods, landslides and storms more than doubled last year, according to a written reply laid before the Lok Sabha on Tuesday. The figures, given by the minister of state for home affairs, Nityanand Rai, in answer to Unstarred Question No. 2757, run 2,849 lives lost in 2023-24, 2,979 in 2024-25 and 6,631 in 2025-26 — a rise of 123% in a single year, and more than double any annual figure the ministry has printed since 2020-21.
Almost all of the increase is one state. Uttar Pradesh reports 4,099 deaths for 2025-26, against 88 the year before and 47 the year before that. That is 62% of the national total and a 47-fold rise on its own previous figure. Take Uttar Pradesh out and deaths across the other 35 states and union territories fall, from 2,891 to 2,584.
The reply offers no explanation for the jump, and there is reason to treat it as a change in reporting rather than in mortality. The ministry states in the same document that it "does not centrally maintain data regarding the loss of lives and property due to any disaster": the annexure is headed as reported by states and union territories, and marked provisional. In an earlier answer, in March, the ministry recorded Uttar Pradesh as reporting 170 deaths in 2024 from just three districts — a figure incompatible with the 88 now printed for the year. What changed between the two is what the state submitted, not what the ministry counted.
The table also does not add up. Re-adding the ministry's own state rows, six columns fail to reconcile with the totals printed beneath them. The 2025-26 death column sums to 6,683 against a printed 6,631, 52 more than the ministry's own figure. Houses and huts damaged sum to 156,364 against a printed 202,364 — a gap of exactly 46,000. In the financial annexure, the centre's share of state disaster relief funds released in 2025-26 sums to Rs 23,983.20 crore against a printed Rs 24,193.20 crore, short by exactly Rs 210 crore, and national disaster relief fund releases sum to Rs 5,809.33 crore against Rs 5,909.26 crore printed. Two further gaps sit in the 2024-25 columns.
Round-number shortfalls of exactly 46,000 and exactly Rs 210 crore look more like an omitted row or a transcription slip than an accumulation of rounding. Every 2023-24 column reconciles to the unit, which is what makes the failures in the later years conspicuous.
There are real events behind the numbers. The cropped area reported as damaged in 2025-26 is 103.28 lakh hectares against 13.11 the year before, with Maharashtra alone accounting for 75.42 lakh — and that column does reconcile. Himachal Pradesh received Rs 1,890.09 crore from the national disaster relief fund, roughly a third of all such releases, though its own reported deaths fell across the three years, from 556 to 408 to 195.
One caution on reading the two annexures together: the damage table covers 36 states and union territories while the money table covers 28 states only, so ratios drawn across them do not hold.