Covid Deaths In India: Is The WHO Right?

A WHO report on Covid-related deaths suggests that the toll in India was far larger than the official numbers, but as both sides lay out their arguments, one truth stands exposed—the lack of transparency and accuracy of data

- Sonali Acharjee

That there could be an empirical grey zone over such a stark and undeniable fact as mortality may seem improbable. But India is at the centre of a raging debate over precisely such a thing, with the World Health Organization (WHO) offering an estimate of Covid-19 deaths in India that’s nearly 10 times the official toll. Scepticism on official data is not an unknown sentiment at the best of times, and Covid is a particularly sensitive topic—India is not immune to the universal tendency to under-report mortality. But the jousting here is ultimately between two sets of estimates, which leaves a core question unanswered: will we ever know how many died in the pandemic?