A study published in Science Advances reveals a startling revelation about India’s COVID-19 death toll during the first wave in 2020. The research suggests that the actual number of deaths could be eight times higher than the official figures, depicting the pandemic’s true impact on the country.
According to a study co-authored by 10 demographers and economists from elite international institutes, India had about 1.19 million excess deaths in 2020 compared to 2019, much higher than the official COVID-19 death count of 148,738 reported by the Indian government for the same period.
“The findings are alarming and suggest a significant underreporting of COVID-19 deaths in India,” said Aashish Gupta, one of the study’s authors and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford. “The pandemic’s impact was far greater than acknowledged until now.”
The study’s estimates surpass the World Health Organization’s (WHO) projections for India’s COVID-19 death toll in 2020 by 1.5 times, highlighting the potential underreporting scale.
More concerning are the study’s findings on the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on marginalized communities in India. The research reveals stark inequalities in how different social groups were affected by the virus.
“The life expectancy of an upper-caste Hindu Indian decreased by 1.3 years in 2020,” Gupta explained. “In contrast, ‘scheduled castes’ – communities that faced centuries of discrimination under the caste system – saw their life expectancy drop by 2.7 years.”
The study found that Indian Muslims suffered the most, with their life expectancy dropping by 5.4 years in 2020.
T Sundararaman, a public health expert and former executive director of the National Health Systems Resource Centre, commented on these findings. “The consequences are more pronounced upon more marginalized sections… everything adds on,” he told Al Jazeera.
Contrary to global trends, the study found that women in India were more severely affected than men during the pandemic. Indian men’s life expectancy fell by 2.1 years in 2020, while it decreased by an additional year for women.
Longstanding gender-based discrimination and inequality in resource allocation in a patriarchal society contribute to higher female life expectancy declines,” Gupta noted. “We knew that women were vulnerable in Indian society, but the difference was shocking.”
The research highlighted that the youngest and oldest Indians experienced the steepest increases in mortality rates. However, the authors caution that this could be due to disruptions in public health services, including childhood immunizations and tuberculosis treatment, rather than direct COVID-19 deaths.
The Indian government disputes higher death toll estimates, including those from the WHO, which suggests India’s COVID-19 deaths could be between 3.3 million and 6.5 million – the highest for any country.
Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto, who supported the WHO’s excess death calculations, stated, “The Delta wave was way deadlier than 2020. Our estimate for the whole pandemic period was about 3.5-4 million excess deaths, with nearly 3 million from the Delta wave.”
The study’s authors and experts have called for greater transparency in data collection and reporting from the Indian government.
“The government needs to make the data public for scrutiny. Not engaging with these studies gains nothing,” Sundararaman emphasized to Al Jazeera.
Gupta added, “There are data gaps everywhere. The 2021 estimates are expected to be higher than 2020.”
The study’s findings have significant implications for understanding the pandemic’s impact on India and highlight the need for improved healthcare access and targeted support for marginalized communities.
Professor Ridhi Kashyap, another author, stressed the importance of focusing on inequality when measuring mortality. “Our study shows that pandemics can worsen, rather than equalize, existing disparities,” she said.
The researchers plan to analyze 2021 data to understand sub-national variations in the pandemic’s effects.
India’s experience is part of a global pattern of potential underreporting of COVID-19 deaths, especially in low and middle-income countries. The discrepancies highlighted by this study underscore the challenges in accurately assessing the pandemic’s true toll worldwide.
