The ghost of Covid-19 continues to haunt India. Recently published data from the Civil Registration System have offered the first official indication of the extent of undercounting of deaths during the pandemic. The official death toll from Covid-19 in 2021 — the year of the deadly second or Delta wave of the pandemic — was pegged at 3.32 lakh. Now, CRS data show that it is likely to have been around 21 lakh — six times more than the official estimate. The official mortality count for 2020 — 1.48 lakh — too is about three times less than what the CRS data denote. The numbers could be higher still as not all deaths are registered. During the pandemic, the fear of social stigma had led many survivors to conceal the true cause of demise.

It must be pointed out that the possibility that India was undercounting Covid-19 deaths had been raised repeatedly by not only international organisations like the World Health Organization — it put the number of ‘excess’ deaths in India in 2020 and in 2021 at about 47 lakh — but also by the national and the international media. But the Narendra Modi government’s response to these charges has been either defensive or dismissive. The Union government’s reluctance to comprehensively assess the pandemic’s true impact and its casual approach to publishing critical demographic data — the official total pandemic death count on the Covid-19 dashboard of the Union ministry of health and family welfare still reads 5.33 lakh — are certainly informed by political imperatives. This is shameful and self-defeating. This is because pandemics, scientists have warned, are expected to get more frequent and severe. A foolproof method of enumeration of the Covid-19 outbreak could have been useful to not only assess the possible impact of future public health crises but also devise contingency plans to tackle them. While the registration of data related to birth and death has improved in the country, an effective causal analysis of death eludes the Civil Registration System. Perhaps there is a case for its modernisation as well as the enforcement of the protocol mandated by WHO — this includes identifying the underlying cause of death or the conditions that contribute significantly to the demise — when it comes to registering public death data.

The belated admission of the undercounting of Covid-19 fatalities reveals another contemporary crisis: the lack of authentic data in New India. Be it economic challenges or public health emergencies, the availability of credible data that is crucial for analysts to understand the prevailing challenges and prepare interventions is not up to the mark. This is not merely the result of the weakening of or underinvestment in relevant institutions. It also signifies an erosion in the democratic compact. The people’s right to be informed is sacrosanct in such a polity. Its undermining is a transgression.