By Abhik Deb
Muslims saw the steepest decline in life expectancy in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic in India, indicating the highest rise in mortality risk among all social groups, a new research paper based on the National Family Health Survey has found.
Life expectancy of Muslims went down by 5.4 years between 2019 and 2020, more than four times the decline of 1.3 years seen among upper-caste Hindus.
The decline among other socially disadvantaged groups was also high: 4.1 years for Scheduled Tribes and 2.7 years for Scheduled Castes.
Life expectancy is the average number of years that a person is expected to live. When mortality rises among a group, life expectancy goes down.
The paper published on Friday in the science journal Science Advances compared life expectancy at birth among Indians in 2019 to that in 2020, using data from the National Family Health Survey, which it says is representative of about one-fourth of India’s population.
Overall, life expectancy at birth among Indians was 2.6 years lower and mortality was 17% higher in 2020 than the previous year, the research found.
This implies 11.9 lakh excess deaths in 2020, according to the research paper. Excess deaths is a metric used to analyse Covid-19 mortality by calculating the divergence between deaths reported due to all causes in a pandemic year and in normal years.
This estimate for excess deaths in India in 2020 is nearly eight times the official number of Covid-19 fatalities, and 1.5 times the excess deaths estimated by the World Health Organization during the year, the researchers said in their paper.
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