There is no proper data on the deaths in the Country. Other countries point out that the deaths due to Covid are high in India while India claims that the deaths are less in India when compared to other countries.
The Central health ministry had earlier this week accused the World Health Organisation of ignoring “authentic data” from the CRS statistics report for 2020 and using extrapolation and modelling instead to estimate excess deaths in India over the past two pandemic-hit years.
The WHO has estimated 4.7 million excess deaths in India between 2020 and 2021, 9.8 times the country’s official Covid-19 death toll of 481,000 over those years.
The CRS recorded an excess of only 474,000 deaths during 2020 over the previous year’s count.
Indian health officials have asserted that the CRS figure is closest to the truth and should be taken as authentic data. The authenticity claim hinges on the registration level which, according to the health ministry, increased from 84 per cent in 2018 to 92 per cent in 2019 and 99.9 per cent in 2020.
But the NFHS 2019-21, based on a sample of over 636,000 households, has noted a nationwide death registration level of 71 per cent, with the figure below 80 per cent in 19 states.
