By Krishna Jha
The new Covid death data, released recently by the government, reveals everything that confirms what was feared at the time of the pandemic – a massive mismanagement on the part of the government. The new data from the Civil Registration System (CRS), published on May 7, show that about 21 lakh more deaths were registered in 2021, the year of the deadly Delta wave of Covid-19, compared to 2020. This number is about six times the official Covid 2019 death figure. In 2021, the data given by the union government was 3.32 lakh.
The new revelation shows how the Modi government indulged in a criminal negligence of its responsibility. It is once again clear that Modi government’s Covid handling was a miserable failure even though it boasted of “saving humanity”. It is also clear that at the time of the pandemic it fudged the covid death data and went after those who spoke the truth.
The new revelation has once again revived the question of the Modi government’s motivations behind the handing of the data of various kinds. Clearly, there are areas where it has buried or blacked out the data that was inconvenient to its agenda of running a glorious Hindutva regime; if not, the government and its supporters have disputed the quality of that data, or the conclusions drawn from it.
It has also faced allegations of fudging the data, for example, in the case of India’s GDP. If the first is to bury bad news, the latter is to project the image of good news. But there is another novel way in which the Modi government tries to institute its achievement of having done better than its predecessors. This is a clever tactic which is often overlooked not only by the average voter but also by experts who are taken in by the dominant media narrative of trumpeting a particular achievement.
The country’s official COVID-19 death toll, as of May 2025, has been presented as approximately 5,33,665. This figure, however, forms little more than a drop in the number of actual deaths in the pandemic.
Recently, the government released the Report on Medical Certification of Cause of Death, 2021, which suggested that the total deaths in 2021 alone rose by over 21 lakh compared to pre-pandemic levels. Yet, only five lakh of those are officially attributed to COVID-19, revealing a massive underreporting of the pandemic-related fatalities across the country.
The total official COVID-19 death toll since the start of the pandemic was representing only 5.2 percent of the total excess deaths recorded in 2021. The Civil Registration System (CRS) data is the first official suggestion of the extent of the undercounting of deaths that occurred during the pandemic.
This discrepancy, which varies across states, also creates an uncertainty about the actual COVID-19 death count which has been revealed now to be far higher than the official figures. Some states, particularly in North and Western India, showed significant underreporting, with official death numbers missing millions of lives lost to the pandemic.
In a typical, non-pandemic year, the number of deaths in India increases only marginally by about 1–2percent annually. This small rise is due to gradual population growth and demographic changes such as aging, but is often offset by improvements in healthcare and declining death rates.
Significantly higher increases — such as the 26 percent jump in deaths registered in 2021 — are abnormal and typically signal extraordinary events like pandemics or disasters. Between 2007 and 2019, the average annual deaths in India ranged from 8.1 million to 8.6 million, with a mean of about 8.35 million (83.5 lakh) deaths per year.
A World Health Organization report released in 2022 put the number of “excess” deaths in India in 2020 and 2021 at about 47 lakh, almost 10 times the official Indian figure of 4.8 lakh for those two years.
Among the larger states in India, undercounting was particularly pronounced in states like Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh. In those regions, the number of COVID-19 deaths reported was a fraction of the actual loss of life caused by the pandemic.
For instance, Madhya Pradesh saw an increase of 178,000 deaths in 2021 compared to 2020. But only 10,788 deaths were officially attributed to COVID-19, meaning the official COVID-19 toll was roughly 65 times lower than the total excess deaths.
Similarly, in Uttar Pradesh, 478,682 additional deaths were recorded in 2021, but only 23,743 deaths were officially linked to COVID-19. This represented a huge undercount, showing just how many deaths went unclassified or were attributed to other causes.
These discrepancies were not isolated cases, they reflect a broader issue of underreporting and poor documentation, a reality faced by many parts of India, especially during the devastating second wave of COVID-19 in 2021.
In this entirely grim scenario, Kerala displayed a higher degree of accuracy in its reporting. While the state saw a significant increase in deaths in 2021, with 339,648 registered deaths, a 35.3 percent rise compared to 2020, the total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 stood at 72,139. This meant that COVID-19 deaths accounted for a considerable share of the total excess deaths, making up 21.2 percent of the deaths in 2021. Kerala’s transparency in death certification and health reporting was evident, and its handling of the crisis still stands as one of the few examples where the pandemic’s full toll has been reflected in official records. (IPA Service)
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