Nearly 86.5 lakh deaths were reported in the country during 2022, a significant decline of more than 15 per cent from Covid-affected 2021 which had recorded over 1.02 crore deaths, according to a new data from the Civil Registration System (CRS).
The drop is seen as a significant demographic indicator, reflecting the toll of the pandemic on the nation's population.
In India, 11.9 lakh excess deaths occurred in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, 17 per cent higher compared to 2019, an international study has found.
The increase in death registration in 2020 compared to 2019 is not entirely due to Covid fatalities, Niti Aayog member VK Paul has said, asserting that "exorbitant" multiples of coronavirus deaths being published by some agencies with respect to India must stop.
The ministry said the country has a robust system of reporting deaths, including those caused by COVID-19, and the data is compiled regularly at different levels of governance, starting from the gram panchayat level to the district level and the state level.
These kinds of assumptions to be used for a nation of India's size and "to put us in poor light is not desirable"
About 3.2 million people could have died from Covid in India by September last year, six-seven times higher than reported officially, according to a study based on one independent and two government data sources.
'There is no rationale behind the modelling methodology used by WHO to arrive at the estimate'
India has been consistently objecting to the methodology adopted by the WHO to project excess mortality estimates based on mathematical models, the Union Health Ministry said in a statement.
The pandemic has changed the way people see the government. It has eroded trust in the administration's ability to tackle a crisis, any crisis, observes Devangshu Datta.
Given the robust and statute-based death registration system in India, while some cases could go undetected as per the principles of infectious disease and its management, missing out on the deaths is unlikely, the Union health ministry said.
An analysis of WHO data shows that most of the countries with an older cohort of population and higher in the development index had a lower excess mortality rate than India.
'If deaths had been properly reported, it would have helped contain the pandemic.'
The NSSO had enumerated 79,306 households in rural areas and 45,374 in urban regions.
'Eleven of our mega states such as UP, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have contributed 70 per cent of the cases and 75 per cent of the deaths.'
Experts believe that under-reporting is likely to cause an underestimation of the spread of the disease.
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