‘Undercounting’ COVID deaths: Congress accuses Union government of depravity
The Union government came under criticism from the Congress on Sunday over a reported discrepancy between the official COVID-19 death toll and the number of deaths recorded in the civil registration system during the pandemic.
According to data published on May 7, India experienced at least 37.4 lakh excess deaths in 2020 and 2021, compared to the two years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—2018 and 2019.
Excess mortality measures the difference between the actual number of deaths during a crisis, such as a pandemic or natural disaster, and the expected number of deaths under normal conditions. This metric helps assess the true impact of a crisis, as it accounts for both reported and unreported fatalities.
The Opposition has long contended that the official pandemic death tolls were “systematically underreported.”
“We now discover that an additional 20 lakh deaths were recorded across India in 2021 alone,” Jairam Ramesh, the party’s communications chief, stated in a social media post on Sunday.
“Most of these can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, and this estimate of 20 lakh is nearly six times higher than the official COVID death tally of 3.3 lakh,” he added.
Ramesh further stated, “From the migrant crisis to the manufactured shortage of vaccines, from the mass deaths and oxygen shortages to the Prime Minister’s insistence on campaigning in West Bengal rather than prioritising human lives—the cruellest and vilest impulses of the Modi government were on display during the pandemic.”
Official civil registration data reveals a significant increase in mortality during the pandemic years. While India recorded 145 lakh deaths in 2018–2019, the toll surged to 183 lakh in 2020–2021, reflecting 37.4 lakh excess deaths during the two-year COVID-19 period. These figures, compiled from local government records of registered births and deaths, suggest that the pandemic’s true impact may have been far greater than the officially reported COVID-19 fatalities.
India’s official COVID-19 death toll currently stands at 5.3 lakh, in contrast to the excess mortality figures. The first death attributed to the virus was reported in March 2020.
A closer look at state-level mortality data reveals notable differences in COVID-19’s impact across India. Despite relatively low official death tolls in some states, Scroll’s analysis found that Gujarat, Bihar, and Chhattisgarh were among the hardest hit, with actual deaths far surpassing the reported figures. This suggests that official counts may have underestimated the true toll of the pandemic in these states.
On Sunday, Ramesh stated that Modi’s “home state of Gujarat has earned the dubious distinction of underreporting deaths on an alarming scale—33 times more deaths were reported than acknowledged by the Gujarat government.”
He further added, “It would be too much to expect this government to show any regret or remorse for its tone-deaf actions, but when history is written, it will undoubtedly record this act of depravity.”
