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The international study, co-authored by the Department of Sociology and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science’s Dr Aashish Gupta and Professor Ridhi Kashyap, reveals that life expectancy in India suffered large and unequal declines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overall, mortality across India was 17% higher in 2020 compared to 2019, implying 1.19 million excess deaths in India. This extrapolated estimate is about eight times higher than the official number of COVID-19 deaths in India, and 1.5 times higher than the World Health Organization’s estimates.
Ridhi Kashyap, Professor of Demography and Computational Social Science at the University of Oxford said, ‘Our findings challenge the view that 2020 was not significant in terms of the mortality impacts and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. While a mortality surge caused by the Delta variant in 2021 received more attention, our study reveals significant and unequal mortality increases even earlier on in the pandemic.'
Using high-quality survey data from 765,180 individuals, the study estimated changes in life expectancy at birth, by sex and social group between 2019 and 2020 in India – a country where one-third of global pandemic excess deaths are thought to have occurred.