Three weeks after the health ministry claimed to have achieved 99.99 percent death registration in 2020, the Registrar General of India has indirectly confirmed the figure. This, then, is the first time that India claims to have registered every death – in a pandemic-hit year, no less.
In a bulletin on Wednesday, the registrar general estimated India’s 2020 mortality rate at six per 1,000 people, the same as the previous year. For a projected population of just over 135 crore, that means 81.2 lakh deaths from all causes. The estimate is based on the findings of a baseline survey called the Sample Registration System, or SRS.
