Discuss the institutional and infrastructural gaps that limit India's capacity to conduct extreme event attribution for localised weather disasters.

Extreme event attribution (EEA) estimates how far human-induced warming has altered the likelihood or intensity of a specific event, by comparing model ensembles of the present world against a counterfactual pre-industrial world [1]. India faces recurrent cloudbursts, flash floods and urban flooding, yet its capacity to deliver such verdicts for these localised, sub-daily events remains constrained on both fronts.

Infrastructural gaps

• Observational sparsity: attribution needs dense, high-resolution records, but automatic weather stations and rain gauges thin out sharply beyond metros — IMD is only now adding 200 AWS across Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune [2].
• Computing power: convective cloudbursts operate at scales of a few kilometres and a few hours; resolving them demands high-performance computing and next-generation radars that Mission Mausam is still building [3].
• Short record length: discontinuous rainfall series weaken statistical detection. Globally too, the IPCC assesses temperature extremes with far higher confidence than localised heavy precipitation [4] — a gap India's data scarcity widens.

Institutional gaps

• No dedicated attribution body: verdicts on Indian events come largely from international collaborations that publish rapid attribution studies within days or weeks [5], leaving domestic ownership weak.
• Fragmented mandates: capability is split across IMD, NCMRWF and IITM under the Ministry of Earth Sciences [3], with attribution an explicit deliverable of none.
• Definitional ambiguity: absent standard national thresholds for "extreme", event boundaries and durations vary across agencies, complicating replication [1].
• Weak policy interface: attribution outputs are not systematically channelled into disaster-management planning or loss and damage claims, a linkage the UNFCCC explicitly recognises [1].

India's attribution deficit is therefore less a scientific failing than an investment and coordination challenge. Densifying observation networks under Mission Mausam, scaling HPC for convection-permitting models, and mandating a nodal attribution cell that feeds NDMA and India's climate-finance negotiations would close it. Credible attribution ultimately strengthens the adaptive, evidence-led disaster governance that climate justice and SDG-13 both demand.