Coronavirus: India’s death toll 10 times higher than official count at 4 million

Pandemic is probably the worst human tragedy in India’s modern history, study finds after calculating gap between reported and actual deaths.

A man prays next to a burning pyre of a realive who died of Covid-19 in New Delhi. Picture; AFP.

India’s death toll during the pandemic topped four million, ten times the official count, according to a report.

The study published by the Centre for Global Development and Harvard University found that the pandemic was probably the worst human tragedy in India’s modern history.

India has recorded more than 414,000 Covid-19 deaths, according to official statistics, but experts have warned since the crisis began that the true caseload and death toll are likely to be many times higher. Those suspicions have increased since a second wave of infections devastated the country this year, with 400,000 new cases and fatalities exceeding 4,000 a day, triggering a collapse of the healthcare system.

Relatives carry the body of a victim who died of Covid-19 to cremation at a cremation ground in New Delhi. Picture: AFP.

The government of Narendra Modi has dismissed the claims as exaggerated. States have been accused of covering up Covid-19 deaths to save face since the start of the crisis. This has exacerbated inaccurate record-keeping in the world’s second most populous nation, which has a population of 1.4 billion. Most Indians die at home, while at the peak of the second wave thousands of bodies were dumped in the Ganges or buried in shallow graves as wood for funeral pyres ran short.

The report used three data sources to calculate excess deaths - the gap between recorded and expected deaths - during the pandemic up to June 21. Researchers extrapolated data from the civil registration system that records births and deaths across seven states, accounting for half of India’s population. This was combined with data from two nationwide antibody tests and set against global fatality rates in different age groups. Finally, the study looked at a survey of consumers conducted across thousands of Indian households three times a year, which also records whether a family member has died in the past four months.

The researchers, who included Arvind Subramanian, India’s former chief economic adviser, cautioned that Covid-19 deaths in the seven states may not be the same across the whole of India. However, they concluded that “actual deaths during the pandemic are likely to have been an order of magnitude greater than the official count”. A death toll of four million or higher represented “arguably India’s worst human tragedy since partition and independence” in 1947, the study said.

The Times