India now warns 84% of citizens before disasters, but why only 4 in 10 can act

India has largely cracked the hard part of disaster warning—of getting the alert out. What it continues to struggle with is what happens in the minutes after.A new global survey finds that 84 per cent of Indians hit by a disaster in the past five years were warned in advance, better than the global figure of 80 per cent. But only 40 per cent of those warned were able to act, against 64 per cent worldwide. Six in 10 Indians who got the alert could do nothing with it.The numbers come from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, released on November 3, for which analytics consulting firm Gallup interviewed over 143,000 people across 140 countries and territories in 2025.“Four in five people affected by a disaster now receive warnings before it strikes. That’s real progress. But a warning is only as good as what people are able to do with it,” says Nancy Hey, director of evidence and insight at the Foundation’s Global Safety Evidence Centre. India’s problem is not reach. Six in 10 Indians warned received the alert through three or more channels, the point at which, the report says, warnings should start to change behaviour. SACHET (Common Alerting Protocol Based Integrated Alert System) now covers all 36 states and Union territories; a Cell Broadcast Alert System was launched this May.Nor is distrust the problem. Some 63 per cent of Indians believe the national government is well prepared for a disaster, against 53 per cent globally, and the country ranks 21st out of 139 on societal resilience.The failure is within the home. Only 21 per cent of Indian households are aware of what to actually do after the warning is received. And only one in four Indians feels able to protect themselves and their family. The poll’s measure of personal agency in India has dropped 26 percentage points since 2023, part of a slide—shared with Pakistan and Indonesia—that has pulled individual resilience worldwide to its lowest recorded level.That does not put the burden on families alone. “These findings remind us that resilience may start at home, but households cannot build it alone,” says Loretta Hieber Girardet, chief of risk knowledge, monitoring and capacity development at the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. “Whether people can protect themselves depends on the investments and decisions made long before a disaster strikes.”The UN wants everyone covered by early warning systems by the end of 2027. India amended its Disaster Management Act in 2025 and is drafting its first National Adaptation Plan, after a year of severe heat and deadly monsoon floods. The poll suggests the next rupee is better spent not on another siren or SMS but the unglamorous work of telling communities, families where to go, what to carry and whom to call when the phone buzzes with a warning.India’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has guidelines for heat waves, cyclones, floods and glacial lake outbursts, but these are addressed to government officials. Households are usually given a list of standard dos and don’ts. The SMS alerts or broadcast messages on mainstream media or social media often miss a clear call to action on what to do when disaster strikes. More than 250 cities and districts in 23 states now have heat action plans, a model that began in Ahmedabad in 2013, but most of these plans leave the last mile of action to local authorities, with little mechanism of ensuring that the plan translates into action.“The local authorities issue an advisory but not a mandate or solution. For instance, during extreme heat wave warnings, construction sites are advised to change working hours to early mornings or evenings, but it is not legally binding. Daily wage labourers are known to continue work as it is not an option for them,” says a Gandhinagar-based public health expert.The Sustainable Futures Collaborative study last year of nine cities, including Delhi, Mumbai and Surat, found they rely on short-term fixes, such as water stations and changed work hours, while experts have called for fundamental solutions like enhanced free medical facilities, hospitals on stand-by as well as make a binding shift for school and work hours.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends