MoS health Bharti Pravin Pawar. Photo: Twitter/@DrBharatippawar
New Delhi: Bharati Pravin Pawar, the minister of state for health, said in the Rajya Sabha on March 30 that India had “one of the lowest” COVID-19 death tolls.
Her reply had two parts. She said, per WHO figures, India registered 374 deaths per million and this was one of the lowest. In terms of deaths per million, that data might be true. But even the WHO dashboard suggests India has recorded 0.52 million deaths thus far. This is the third-highest after the US (0.97 million) and Brazil (0.65 million).
The second part of her reply was about underreporting of COVID-19 deaths. Many papers have revealed that India missed deaths by a factor of 7-8. The latest said 4.7 million Indians died due to COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021 – the highest in the world. Even today, India’s official toll is only 0.52 million.
According to an analysis by Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, 3.2 million people died in these two years. There have been other estimates (see here, here, here and here), all pointing at large-scale fatality underreporting in India.
The Union government responded with denial in all cases – as did Bharti in parliament. And the second part of her answer was:
“These reports have mostly relied on unvalidated methodologies, or data sources used to derive ‘estimates’ are not reliable. In most of these studies, the results have been obtained using mathematical modelling techniques from a limited sample of small sub-population subgroups which is extrapolated to the entire country.”
These studies got their data from the government’s civil registration system (CRS). They compared CRS numbers from 2020 and 2021 with that from previous years, and found a sharp rise in overall mortality during the pandemic period. So it wasn’t clear if the minister thought CRS was unreliable.
It’s true that CRS data was available for a dozen states. For the rest, researchers either used models or surveys. But the government has only denied their findings, based on either method.
The WHO also reckons that undercounted COVID-19 deaths is a real and global phenomenon, and is soon expected to present a report on the matter. Let’s see how the government responds to that.