2021 saw almost 2 million extra deaths, shows MHA data

India likely recorded almost two million extra deaths in 2021, the deadliest year of the Covid-19 pandemic, than it did in the preceding few years. It also recorded 81,070 more deaths because of the pandemic than what was captured in the official death toll.

These numbers were released in three reports released on Wednesday by the Office of the Registrar General of India (RGI), under the Ministry of Home Affairs. They are the first official confirmation of the fact that India’s official death toll during the Covid-19 pandemic might have been a gross underestimate, which was indicated in various modelling estimates.

The RGI released three reports for 2021 -- the Sample Registration System (SRS) Statistical Report 2021, the Vital Statistics of India Based on the Civil Registration System (CRS) 2021, and the Report on the Medical Certification of Cause of Death (MCCD) 2021. CRS is the record of all registered deaths and births in the country. SRS is a survey-based estimate of births and deaths and tries to cover unregistered births and deaths as well, making it a vital complement to the CRS data. The MCCD captures a small fraction of the CRS deaths where deaths are medically certified. Minus a census, which has not been done since 2011, SRS and CRS are the closest official estimates of mortality and birth statistics in India.

The SRS report for 2021 shows that crude death rate (CDR) – the number of estimated deaths per 1,000 population – shot up to 7.5 in 2021, the deadliest year of the Covid-19 pandemic. To put this in context, CDR was 6 in 2020 and 6.2 in both 2018 and 2019. If these rates are applied to the mid-year population projections of the National Commission on Population, the number of total deaths in India from 2018 to 2021 are 8.2 million, 8.3 million, 8.1 million, and 10.3 million. This suggests that there were around 2 million excess deaths in 2021. Even the CRS, which counts only registered deaths, shows an increase of around 2 million deaths in 2021. The number of deaths registered in the CRS from 2018 to 2021 are 7 million, 7.6 million, 8.1 million, and 10.2 million. The difference in mortality recorded in CRS and SRS estimates can be assumed to be on account of non-registered deaths.

What explains the drop in estimated deaths in 2020 and a sharp rise in 2021 despite both being pandemic years? One reason could have been that the lockdown in 2020 brought down deaths on account of accidents being avoided, as was seen in Accidental Deaths and Suicides report released by the National Crime Records Bureau. Accidental deaths showed a fall from 4,21,104 in 2019 to 3,74,397 in 2020, according to NCRB data. Moreover, the pandemic case load itself was significantly higher in India in 2021 than 2020.

This estimate of excess deaths as suggested in the CRS and SRS data are over six times the number recorded in daily bulletins issued during the Covid-19 pandemic by various states and collated by HT in its own pandemic dashboard. The official death toll in these bulletins in 2021 was just 0.33 million. To be sure, deaths were also adjusted later in bulletins. However, even accounting for these reconciliations, the total official tally of Covid-19 deaths in India—the total of deaths recorded from 2020 to February 24, 2025--was only 0.53 million. This means that the official count of deaths is a gross under-estimate.

The MCCD report gives yet another official estimate of the death toll from the pandemic in 2021. The MCCD report counted 4,13,580 Covid-19 deaths in 2021 and 160,618 deaths in 2020. While higher than the official Covid-19 death toll, even the MCCD number for pandemic deaths in 2020 and 2021 is likely to be an underestimate because only 22% and 23% of deaths registered in CRS were medically certified.