Mapping the position of slow-onset hazards in India’s disaster research: a bibliometric perspective

Slow-onset events like drought, coastal erosion, groundwater decline, and sea level rise are affecting many regions in India. However, according to Indian disaster management laws, only drought is treated as a hazard and the rest of slow-onset events are considered as environmental or developmental problems. This study aims to find out the reason why this happens by analysing how Indian academic research has treated these hazards during the time period of 2015–2025. Using bibliometric analysis of Web of Science records, the study explores keywords, research trends, and thematic clusters to show that these slow-onset events are well documented, but mostly as isolated environmental or agricultural problems and not as a separate category of hazards. They are rarely connected to disaster discourse in the country and thus, the idea of “slow-onset hazards” as a distinct category is almost absent. Moreover, technical tools like GIS, remote sensing, and more recently machine learning are widely used in the study of these events, but they have not shifted the conceptual framing of disaster governance. This gap in Indian academic writing of slow-onset events may explain why India’s disaster laws and institutions continue to overlook hazards that develop slowly but cause long-term damage.