Health groups and academics have asked the Centre and the states to reveal data on registered deaths across India to help policy makers and researchers determine how the coronavirus pandemic has affected mortality.

Death registration data will enable the calculation of “excess deaths” over what would be expected under normal circumstances. This will help quantify the impact of Covid-19 on death rates in real time and guide policy responses, the experts have said.

Such data will help health authorities identify places where people’s movements need to be restricted, testing increased and health provisions strengthened, the group said in an appeal to India’s Census Commissioner, state registrars and municipal corporations.

The Union health ministry and all affected states release daily and cumulative numbers of Covid-19 deaths, but public health experts have underlined that this information is insufficient to assess the extent to which the epidemic has increased deaths in India.

India on Monday morning recorded 771 Covid-19 deaths over the previous 24 hours, and the country’s cumulative Covid-19 deaths stood at 38,135.

Health authorities also detected 52,972 new Covid-19 cases overnight, raising the number of lab-confirmed infections to 1,803,695 of whom 579,357 patients are under medical supervision.

“Local-level death registration data is very important as this could be used to design actions and responses – not just for Covid-19 but other health issues as well,” said a public health expert from an academic institution who requested not to be named.

The appeal has been signed by members of the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan; the Indian chapter of the People’s Health Movement, a network of medics and public health experts; the Chhattisgarh-based Jan Swasthya Sahyog; the Society for Community Health Awareness and Research; and other non-government health organisations.

The signatories have urged civil registrars to release individual-level anonymised data that contain information on sex, age, home location identifiers and the date of death.

Data on all registered deaths during 2018, 2019 and 2020 would be critical for any estimation of the excess deaths during 2020, the experts have stressed. “If the causes of death are available for these years, we request authorities to release these,” they wrote.

Anant Bhan, a bioethics and health policy researcher and a signatory, said: “Death registration data can help us in better understanding the mortality due to Covid-19, especially at the local level, but also has utility much beyond Covid-19.”

The latest report from India’s civil registration system suggests that 86 per cent of all deaths were registered in the country during 2018. Even in states where registration is incomplete, death reporting from the urban districts is likely to be complete and could help guide policy, they said.

The signatories have said that as public authorities are already stretched and working under constraints during the pandemic, scientists, researchers and public health professionals will help public health authorities in “cleaning, analysing, and understanding the implications of these data”.

“At no other point in the history of India has the data collected by this (registration) system been so important,” they said.