According to the 2021 Civil Registration System (CRS) report released recently by the Central Government, West Bengal registered a colossal 86,736 excess deaths in the pandemic years from 2020 to 2021, much higher than the official COVID-19 death toll for the State.
It is worth noting that the Delta wave hit the nation in 2021.
According to the COVID-19 Health Bulletin published by the West Bengal government in January 2022, a total of 20,619 deaths were reported by the government as the cumulative COVID-19 death toll in the State between March 17, 2020, and January 31, 2022.
However, the spike in the number of deaths recorded between 2020 and 2021 in the State, as per the CRS report, is over four times the recorded COVID-19 death toll.
The spike in deaths in the State between 2020 and 2021 is also staggeringly higher than the spike between 2019 and 2020.
Vital Statistics report
For context, the Ministry of Home Affairs recently released a report on ‘Vital Statistics of India based on the Civil Registration System’ for the year 2021, which contains data on registered births, deaths, infant deaths, and still births across the nation from January 1, 2021, to December 31, 2021.
According to the report, cumulatively, almost 21 lakh more deaths were registered in the country in 2021 than in the preceding year.
Rural areas hit hardest
The CRS report also reveals that a staggering 73,009 (approximately 84%) of these excess deaths in West Bengal occurred in rural areas.
Additionally, a higher number of males contributed to the excess deaths of 2021 (51,970) than females (34,766) in the State. Rural males were the single most affected subgroup, with 43,729 excess deaths over one year.
At a district level, Hooghly recorded the highest annual spike in deaths in the State, with 13,661 excess deaths in 2021 from 2020. It is followed by South 24 Parganas (+12,426), Paschim Bardhaman (+11,250), Nadia (+9,703), and Kolkata (+8,968).
Ashin Chakraborty, a researcher at Kolkata-based data analysis think tank, Sabar Institute, told The Hindu that the excess mortality in Bengal being higher than its reported COVID-19 death toll is a clear case of “under-reporting” of the pandemic’s impact on the population, based on the think tank’s analysis of the CRS report and the State’s health bulletins.
“Globally, the sudden massive spike in deaths in the pandemic years has been attributed to the impact of COVID-19. There could be other reasons behind some of the excess deaths, but the overall spike during the Delta wave in 2021 in India and West Bengal is unprecedented and beyond general trends,” Mr. Chakraborty said, on being asked whether the excess mortality in 2021 can be pointedly attributed to pandemic-related fatalities.
He added that the gap between the State’s official COVID-19 death toll and the total registered deaths in 2021 indicates that a large number of COVID-19 patients could not be adequately diagnosed or treated, therefore indicating the deficiencies in West Bengal’s public healthcare system.
“We also see that while most of the public policy and media coverage during the pandemic were focused on urban populations, the excess mortality between 2020 and 2021 is significantly higher in West Bengal’s rural population. This highlights the severe and perhaps under-reported crisis in these regions,” Mr. Chakraborty said.
Notably, North 24 Parganas (-17,428) and Howrah (-13,390) reported a staggering and sudden decrease in registered deaths in 2021 as compared to 2020. Mr Chakraborty said that the substantial decrease in registered deaths in these two districts is an anomaly and warrants deeper investigation.
Registered causes of death
It is worth noting, that according to the ‘Report on the Medical Certification of Cause of Death’ 2021, published by the Ministry of Home Affairs this month, medically certified deaths account for 23.4% of total registered deaths at the national level. Of that, the top three medically certified causes of death in India in 2021 were attributed to diseases of the circulatory system (29.8%), “codes for special purposes — COVID-19” (17.3%), and diseases of the respiratory system (12.7%).
Dr Anirban Dolui, a public health expert and a nodal officer of the COVID-19 task force constituted by the West Bengal government in 2020, said that the cytokine storm caused in the body during COVID-19 would severely affect the circulatory and respiratory systems of many affected individuals, thus also leading to deaths registered on those accounts.
“However, the gap between excess mortality and the specific COVID-19 death toll can also be explained by the fact that many of the COVID-19 cases were not under treatment in a medical facility. We do not have data on deaths that were therefore not medically certified,” Dr Dolui said.
Published – May 12, 2025 10:43 pm IST