Hyderabad: Did India underreport 21 lakh Covid deaths?
That’s the uncomfortable question rising again after the release of the Civil Registration System (CRS) report recently, which shows a glaring mismatch with the government’s official Covid death tally for 2021.
While the Centre claims 3.32 lakh deaths occurred due to Covid that year, CRS data points to something much larger: an excess of 21 lakh deaths compared to 2020. In raw terms, registered deaths rose from 81.15 lakh in 2020 to over 1.02 crore in 2021. The official Covid toll? Doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Even the government’s own dashboard, as of May 9, pegs total Covid deaths at 5.33 lakh. Researchers say the actual toll could be four to twelve times higher, based on modelling, death registrations, and unexplained spikes during peak outbreak months.
This isn’t new territory—questions about India’s pandemic data have been around since the brutal second wave. But the fresh CRS figures add another layer of statistical discomfort to a long-standing suspicion: that the real death toll was quietly buried under bureaucracy, inconsistency, and overwhelmed systems.
