Counting the dead

Covid-19 has exposed India's civil registration lacunae

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed a massive gap in civil registration data, which has made it impossible to know the real death toll due to the disease. In fact, nobody knows exactly how many Indians have died since 2018, and from what causes. For that matter, there is no way to know exactly how many Indians have been born since 2018. A study from Virginia Commonwealth University, based on the data encompassing parts of 12 states with a population of 825 million, estimates 2.2-2.6 million Indians have died of Covid-19 so far. But the aggregated all-India civil registration data is