In 2021, many journalists and health experts said that India’s covid death numbers were higher than what the government was publishing.
For that, they were trolled mercilessly.
Remember Danish Siddiqui? His photographs from a crematorium in New Delhi sparked massive backlash.
BJP supporters called him a vulture. For highlighting the abnormal number of cremations.
Danish was killed while covering the Afghanistan war. His photographs during Covid won the Pulitzer after his death.
And now 4 years later, Danish and everyone else who pointed out that the government was hiding the real death figures- have been proven right.
Recently released figures by the government show almost 2 million or 20 lakh more people died in 2021.
That's way way higher than what the union government and several state governments had been claiming.
Let Me Explain.
The GOI recently released three annual reports on deaths and births in India.
Let’s look at just the Civil Registration System (CRS) first. It shows 1 crore 2 lakh deaths were registered in 2021.
Here are the numbers from the previous years. From 65 lakhs in 2017, the number of deaths touched 81 lakhs in 2020. 2020 was also a pandemic year- but it did not record as many deaths as 2021.
The death rate in 2021 was abnormal–even if one was to account for a natural increase in the number of deaths. It was 15- 20 lakhs more than what it would have been during a non-pandemic year.
But the Indian government had claimed that just 3.3 lakh people died due to covid.
There are several states that undercounted majorlyI will come to that later. You may be wondering why I am picking up this data now. Normally this data is published two years later. But the Home ministry delayed it .
And last week, when India was in the middle of a war-like situation with Pakistan, this much-awaited data was finally released. Which is why I thought it's important that this episode of Let Me Explain should be on covid deaths.
Now, Before I go into the episode, let me remind you that TNM had reported in 2021 about this undercount in Covid deaths. We brought you reports of excess deaths from Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu.
And the government's data aversion is not just about Covid. Remember the Kumbh stampede? A Newslaundry investigation had revealed that the number of deaths were way higher than what govt data claimed.
Not just these, we have also pointed out the underestimation of manual scavenging deaths in India. And this is exactly why Independent journalism matters. We don’t go behind the noise and sensation, we take time, research, and bring you stories that matter.
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20 lakh excess deaths in India in 2021.
Even now the government has justified it saying that all these deaths cannot be attributed to covid.
Let’s look at the government’s arguments. It says the number of deaths registered could have increased because of population rise.
And that more people would have registered deaths.
At least 10-20% of deaths in India are not even registered. The explanations just don’t add up.
The crude death rate - which is the number of estimated deaths per 1000 people- had been falling for years.
The crude death rate was as high as 14.9 in 1971. It dropped to 6 by 2019 and 2020. In 2021, it suddenly surged to 7.5.
If there had been no pandemic, the death rate would have probably fallen further, or just remained at 6.
Let me simplify it further- If there was no pandemic- and the death rate stayed the same- the deaths would have been around 82 lakhs.
So how did this happen? That’s because most states played along and underreported majorly.
And Gujarat tops that list. The states saw nearly 2 lakh excess deaths in 2021 alone.
And how much of this was reported by the Gujarat Govt? Just 5800. Which is an underreporting of 34 times.
Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal come next, with 18 and 15 times higher deaths.
According to The Hindu’s estimates, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana too saw 18 to 19 times excess deaths compared to the official Covid death toll.
Kerala on the other hand saw the least undercounting- which is 1.5 times. The state’s official death toll was 44,000, while excess deaths was about 69,000.
In July 2021, the Center for Global Development, a US-based research institute, estimated that there could have been 3.4 million to 4.7 million excess deaths in India.
The New York Times and BBC published this study, like many other media. But this study was immediately dismissed by the government.
They called this misinformed and fallacious. The government even blamed the research and said “well conducted research studies on mortalities are usually done after the event when data on mortalities are available from reliable sources.”
But there was no data. It was withheld for years. How did the government expect researchers to do their work?
New York Times, BBC and others faced backlash on social media for publishing these numbers. Some even brought up the fact that the think tank was headed by a Pakistan-born economist at the time, suggesting that there was some kind of hidden agenda behind projecting India badly.
In 2022, there were reports that the World Health Organisation had to delay releasing its estimate of global death toll for months. Why? Because of objections from India. "India's basic objection has not been with the result (whatever they might have been), but rather the methodology adopted for the same," the Union health ministry said.
India questioned WHO’s methodology, claiming that it cannot be applied to such a vast nation.
Almost all of us know someone who died in the pandemic. A family member, a friend, acquaintance, colleague or neighbour.
During most parts of the pandemic, many TV channels pretended things were normal and instead whipped up hate.
But there were others who questioned this ridiculous undercounting.
There were many media houses that patiently reported on excess deaths. Like The Hindu which went state by state. Scroll, Indiaspend, Article 14, and like I said earlier, here at TheNewsMinute too, we did the same thing.
But every time such a report was published- it was met with denial. How did the governments do that? And how did 20 lakh people die mysteriously that year?
Undercounting of Covid deaths isn’t unique to India.
One reason for undercounting was perhaps to pretend that the Covid response was good,
Another reason could be because people could have died of Covid without ever being tested.
Or Covid patients could’ve died at home and never made it to official records.
Methods for officially recording Covid deaths were imperfect. The protocol for recording Covid deaths was set down by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
The guidelines said that a Covid patient’s death should be recorded as Covid death, even if they die without symptoms. So even if a Covid positive person died of respiratory illness, that illness is recorded as ‘immediate cause’ of death. Covid is listed as the ‘underlying cause’.
If a person dies without a Covid test or was Covid negative, but still showed symptoms, they must be listed as a ‘probable Covid death’.
But journalists had found from officials across states that such a liberal counting method was not being followed in practice.
Only when someone died soon after testing positive and had symptoms of COVID-19, were they counted as COVID-19 deaths.
And most of the deaths counted were of people dying in hospitals, although many just died in their homes.
I think it's important we look back at two comments. UK-based medical journal The Lancet had said in 2021 that “Modi's government has shown themselves to be wholly untrustworthy on COVID-19 health data.”
Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology, said that many parts of India were in "data denial.” She called it a “complete massacre of data”.
It wasn’t just India. Worldwide, it estimated the actual number of deaths to be more than three times the number officially recorded – a total of nearly 14.9 million deaths.
We can’t go back in time and count all these Covid deaths that went unrecorded. All we can do now is ask for accountability in the future. For governments not to hide data. And keep citizens in the dark about how grave a situation actually is.
For suggestions and feedbacks, write to pooja@thenewsminute.com
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Produced by Megha Mukundan, edited by Nikhil Sekhar E T, GFX by Dharini Prabha, script & research by Pooja Prasanna & Jahnavi