NEW DELHI: The Centre on Thursday dismissed a research paper which claimed India's COVID toll is six to be eight times higher than the official figure, saying the report was "fallacious and completely inaccurate".
"India has a robust system of reporting deaths including COVID-19 deaths that is compiled regularly at different levels of governance starting from the Gram Panchayat level to the District-level and State level. The reporting of deaths is regularly done in a transparent manner. All deaths are compiled by the Centre after being independently reported by States," the Union Health Ministry said in a statement.
The official figure given by the government was around 4,60,000. The official death count now is 5,10,413 deaths. As for the study conducted by Christophe Guillemot, a researcher at Centre de Sciences Humaines, Delhi, its estimation implies a death tally of about 3.2–3.7 million from March 2020 to early November 2021, a figure about seven–eight times higher than the official numbers.
"With 3.2–3.7 million COVID-19 deaths by November 2021, India now emerges as the country with by far the largest number of deaths in the world, well ahead of the USA (0.8 million), Brazil (0.6), or Mexico (0.3)," the report said.
If India’s revised estimates were incorporated, the world's death toll would rise by several million to 7.8-8.3 million COVID-19 deaths till 1 November 2021, it added. In its statement, the health ministry said that the estimation was "not based on facts and speculative in nature".
"The study has taken four distinct sub populations - the population of Kerala, Indian Railways employees, MLAs and MPs, and school teachers in Karnataka, and uses triangulation process to estimate nationwide deaths," it said.
"Any such projections based on limited data sets and certain specific assumptions must be treated with care before extrapolating the numbers by putting all states and country of the size of India in a single envelope," it added.