India being mainly an agricultural country the economy and further its growth purely depends on the vagaries of the weather and in particular the extreme weather events. The information on extreme weather events lie scattered in the scientific and technical papers and in the research work of many authors and if put together will help the research community for further analysis.

The authors in this paper present a factual and a brief review of the extreme weather events that occurred in India during the last 100 years (1991-2004). The socio-economic impacts of the extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, cyclones, hail storm, thunderstorm, heat and cold waves have been increasing due to large growth of population and its migration towards urban areas which has led to greater vulnerability. In recent years as per WMO review global losses from such extreme weather events is about US $ 50-100 billion annually with loss of life of about 2,50,000. Thus, greater efforts are needed to improve the forecast skill and use these better forecasts in disaster management.