When the monsoon turns merciless in Assam or the sea rises over Odisha’s coast, the damage is overwhelming – homes torn apart, roads submerged, livelihoods wiped out. However, it is when the waters finally recede and what remains unseen that is often the most devastating. The quiet losses that never make it to an official compensation list.
In India, the first casualty of a disaster is rarely the home or the harvest, it’s visibility. For millions who live on the frontlines of climate vulnerability, being unseen in data is the first aftershock. It is this invisibility what Akshvi, an initiative by the non-profit Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEEDS), seeks to end by giving survivors something they have rarely had, the right to record their own losses.
Every year, India loses billions to climate-linked disasters. Cyclones tear through Odisha, flash floods sweep Uttarakhand, and heatwaves push Delhi to its limits. Yet in official records, these catastrophes are reduced to tidy spreadsheets, numbers stripped of names.
Beneath those columns lies a harsher truth. In India, visibility equals entitlement. Relief funds, compensation, and rehabilitation depend on whether your name appears on a list compiled by a handful of officials. For the poor, women, Dalits, and migrants, their names often do not make it to the list. Data, in this sense – decides who gets help and who does not. That is the quiet revolution Akshvi is trying to spark, shifting disaster data directly into a citizen’s hands.
Akshvi short for Aapda Kshati Vivaran, or ‘description of disaster losses’ is a digital disaster wallet that enables families to document what they lose when calamity strikes. Whether it is a collapsed roof, loss of livestock, or a child’s lost textbooks. Akshvi allows people to report damages through WhatsApp, a simple phone call, or with help from trained community volunteers. Built for low-connectivity environments, Akshvi extends digital governance to those with the least access to technology yet the most to lose when disasters hit.
The concept is deceptively simple but profoundly transformative – to democratise disaster data. Instead of waiting, families can record their losses in real time. In its pilot phase between 2022 and 2023, Akshvi was deployed across five districts in Uttar Pradesh, Assam, and West Bengal, including after Cyclone Dana where more than 2,300 households participated.
Independent validation recorded a 98 percent match between self-reported and field-verified data, demonstrating that communities are fully capable of generating credible and accurate records of their own losses. Recent pilots have also played a critical role in shaping Akshvi into a grounded, responsive system rather than a theoretical design. Across different hazard contexts, from post-cyclone damage in West Bengal to recurring riverine floods in Assam and heavy rainfall-triggered displacement in rural Uttar Pradesh, we tested multiple onboarding flows, volunteer training models, and verification mechanisms.
The results revealed a strong willingness among households to self-report when the process is simple and accessible. It also brought to the fore essential design learnings. For example, the need for multilingual support, simplified question pathways, offline functionality, and clear communication about how data will be used. These insights continue to refine Akshvi’s evolution, not as a static platform, but as a learning system built iteratively alongside the communities it aims to serve. The platform is being built to eventually host 300 million disaster wallets, a scale that could transform India’s disaster management landscape.
For decades, disaster relief in India has been based on assessments. Akshvi flips that equation, letting people document their own losses, economic, physical and emotional, restoring agency and dignity. The mother in Assam who lost her home can upload that detail herself. The farmer in Bundelkhand who lost not just his crop but also an ancestral well can record that too.
It’s not charity. It’s citizenship.
Once aggregated, this data creates a bottom-up ledger of loss that is invaluable for policy, planning, and justice. Officials can identify communities with recurring vulnerabilities. Insurers can design fairer products. Climate negotiators can finally back their claims for compensation with ground truth.
Akshvi arrives at a critical moment. India’s climate emergencies are accelerating. The year 2024 was among the hottest years on record, and floods displaced more than 12 million people. Over 75 per cent of Indian districts are classified as vulnerable to recurring hazards like floods, droughts, landslides, heatwaves, etc. Between 2019 and 2023, India incurred over US$ 56 billion in climate-induced damage.
Yet most loss assessments still rely on outdated, paper-based methods. The focus remains on infrastructure, not livelihoods, even though the informal economy employs nearly 90 per cent of India’s workforce. When a small farmer loses tools or a street vendor’s stock is washed away, those losses rarely make it to any official list.
What is not recorded cannot be compensated. What is not compensated cannot be rebuilt. In that sense, Akshvi is not just a data innovation; it is a measure of justice.
At a time when climate adaptation budgets are stretched, and relief systems remain slow, India has quietly built one of the world’s most advanced digital infrastructures, from Aadhaar to UPI to CoWIN. Akshvi builds on that same DNA, with a mission to empower people in disaster recovery through digital technology.
Combining India’s technological capacity with its humanitarian tradition, Akshvi reimagines disaster response not as relief from above but as resilience from below, a citizen-led data movement rooted in local truth.
India’s National Disaster Management Plan (2019) and its National Adaptation Communication to the UN both call for systematic tracking of loss and damage. Yet no integrated, ground-up database exists. Akshvi fills that gap with a citizen-driven architecture that complements official systems. Its granular data can strengthen national planning, inform international ‘Loss and Damage’ negotiations, and bolster India’s case for climate adaptation finance. It offers something the world’s largest democracy has long lacked, a credible, verifiable, human-centred account of what disasters truly cost.
Akshvi’s real promise lies not in faster aid but in deeper accountability. Once loss data becomes transparent and verifiable, it is harder for damage to be undercounted or for funds to be diverted.
When scaled, Akshvi would evolve into a national loss registry, linked to relief, insurance, and social protection systems. Imagine a future where a farmer’s self-reported flood loss automatically triggers a micro-insurance payout, or where government aid flows based on real-time verified data instead of weeks-old estimates.
That is the next frontier of disaster management, not just reacting but anticipating. Not just rebuilding, but rebalancing. The result, fewer shocks, faster recovery, and better use of scarce relief funds.
What’s remarkable about Akshvi is where it comes from, not Silicon Valley or Geneva, but India’s floodplains and drought-prone districts. It is an Indian innovation for an Indian reality, complex, diverse, imperfect, but deeply human.
As climate disasters intensify, the politics of loss and compensation is becoming global. Developing countries rightly argue that those who did the least to cause climate change are paying its highest human cost. To claim justice, one must first count the cost.
That’s where Akshvi is a framework that could help India and the Global South build a credible evidence base for climate negotiations. It brings clarity to data, every household ledger becomes testimony to lived climate impact. Akshvi offers a blueprint for climate accountability, scalable and people-first.
It is fitting that India, a nation that digitised payments, vaccinations, and identity at scale, might also digitise the right to be counted after disaster. When the next flood hits, families will not have to wait to be discovered by surveyors. They will already have a record, a proof, a voice.
Akshvi is not just about numbers or software. It is about who gets seen. It is more than a wallet it is a mirror reflecting the lived realities of climate change, from the ground up. When a woman in Bihar records her flooded field, or a mason in Odisha notes the collapse of his workshop, they are not just entering data they are reclaiming visibility, agency, and dignity.
If India can scale that empowerment, it could rewrite its disaster story, from one of top-down relief to one of shared responsibility and informed resilience. In the years to come, Akshvi will prove that resilience does not begin with a relief package, but with a simple, radical act of being counted.