Mortality data from the Civil Registration System and the National Health Mission (NHM) broadly bears out extrapolations of analysts about the actual impact of the pandemic. The NHM collects data from about 200,000 rural health centres, covering roughly a third of the population.
The NHM segment shows excess mortality of roughly 300,000 in May 2021, compared to May 2019, which was a normal month, as opposed to May 2020. Similarly, in April 2021, the NHM recorded 100,000-plus excess deaths, compared to April 2019.
If we multiply by three to account for population outside the NHM’s footprint, that is roughly 900,000 excess deaths
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