While a recent study found that India recorded an estimated 11.9 lakh excess COVID-19 deaths in 2020, eight times more than the official figure, the Indian government questioned the study’s flawed methodology and misleading findings. 

A recent study claimed that large and unequal life expectancy declines were recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2020. However, the Government of India has rejected the contentious claims. 

According to the study published in Science Advances, India recorded an estimated 11.9 lakh (1.19 million) excess COVID-19 deaths in 2020, eight times more than the official figure. It suggests a very high death toll in the first year of the pandemic, with marginalised populations like Adivasis, Dalits, and Muslims bearing the brunt, and women suffering more than men.

“Our findings demonstrate that the toll of the pandemic was experienced unevenly within India. Whereas in most countries, losses to life expectancy were greater for males than females, we document a loss in life expectancy among females that is one year more than for males,” said the authors of the study. “Compared to 2019, life expectancy at birth was 2.6 years lower and mortality was 17 per cent higher in 2020, implying 1.19 million excess deaths in 2020,” they noted. 

The authors of the study found greater life expectancy declines among disadvantaged caste and religious groups relative to privileged social groups in the subsample.  “Relative to a decline in life expectancy of 1.3 years for high-caste Hindus, who are privileged in Indian society, the loss for Muslims was 5.4 years, for STs was 4.1 years, and for SCs was 2.7 years. Before the pandemic began, each of these three groups faced large disadvantages in life expectancy at birth relative to high-caste Hindus,” as per the study. 

The Indian Government has termed the findings “untenable and unacceptable estimates”, underscoring the flawed methodology of the study. The most important flaw, the government argues, is that the authors have taken a subset of households included in the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) between January and April 2021, compared mortality in these households in 2020 with 2019, and “extrapolated the results to the entire country”.  

“The NFHS sample is representative of the country only when it is considered as a whole. The 23 per cent of households included in this analysis from part of 14 states cannot be considered representative of the country. The other critical flaw is related to possible selection and reporting biases in the included sample due to the time in which these data were collected, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the government reasoned in a recent statement. 

“It is strongly asserted that an excess mortality of about 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper in 2020 over the previous year is a gross and misleading overestimate. It is noteworthy that excess mortality during the pandemic means an increase in deaths due to all causes, and cannot be equated with deaths that were directly caused by COVID-19,” the government said.

Thus, the conundrum of COVID-19 deaths continues. 

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