Political row erupts over India’s Covid toll
NEW DELHI: A political row erupted over the number of Covid-19 fatalities in the country as Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday said that four million Indians died during the pandemic due to Centre’s “negligence”, citing a US newspaper report which said New Delhi is trying to stall a WHO analysis of “excess mortality” that the Indian government alleged employed flawed mathematical modelling.
Gandhi made the allegations in a tweet on Sunday along with a screenshot of the New York Times report dated April 16 that said the World Health Organization’s (WHO) efforts to make global Covid death toll public has been “delayed for months because of objections from India”. A day earlier, the Union health ministry had responded to the article and said India has been in “regular and in-depth technical exchange with WHO on the issue”. “India’s basic objection has not been with the result (whatever they might have been) but rather the methodology adopted for the same,” the Union health ministry had said in a statement.
On Sunday, Gandhi targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Twitter. “Modi ji neither speaks the truth, nor lets others speak. He still lies that no one died due to oxygen shortage!” the former Congress president alleged in a tweet in Hindi.
“I had said earlier as well – due to the negligence of the government during Covid, not five lakh, but 40 lakh Indians died,” Gandhi said, adding: “Fulfil your responsibility, Modi ji – give compensation of ₹4 lakh to every (Covid) victim’s family.”
According to Union health ministry data, a total of 521,751 people had lost their lives to Covid-19 across India till Sunday morning. HT reached out to BJP leaders for a comment but did not get one immediately.
The New York Times report in question had said that an effort by WHO to calculate the real global death toll from the pandemic “has been delayed for months because of objections from India, which disputes the calculation of how many of its citizens died and has tried to keep it from becoming public”.
“The WHO will show the country’s toll is at least four million,” according to the report.
It added that WHO is working on an analysis that seeks to measure the true death toll from the now two-year-long global pandemic by setting up a “Technical advisory group on Covid-19 mortality assessment”.
Responding to the Nytimes report titled ‘India is stalling WHO’S efforts to make global Covid death toll public’, the government on Saturday questioned WHO’S methodology to estimate Covid-19 deaths in the country, saying using a mathematical modelling process for Tier-ii countries (including India) cannot be applied to estimate the death figures for such a vast nation of geographical size and population.
The government added that it was yet to receive a satisfactory response from WHO despite raising concerns over the methodology through a series of formal communications, including six letters between November 17, 2021 and March 2 this year.