Nearly half (49.8%) of medically certified deaths in India were due to cardiovascular disease or respiratory disease in India in 2024, according to data released by the Office of the Registrar General of India (ORGI), which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs. These figures, although they need to be read with several caveats, indicate an increasing trend in the burden of deaths due to lifestyle diseases and perhaps also the harmful effects of polluted air in India, an issue often cited by health agencies in India and abroad.
Certainly some of the increase in these numbers could simply be due to better reporting as medically certified deaths still represent a small proportion not only of total deaths but even of deaths recorded in India.
A total of 2,066,117 deaths were medically documented in 2024, 23.1% of all deaths registered in the year through the Civil Registration System (CRS), the official record of all births and deaths in the country. The 2024 share of medically documented deaths was 1.1 percentage points higher than in 2023 and the highest since 2021 (the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in India) when this figure reached 23.4%.
The trends shown above are from the 2024 Cause of Death Medical Certification Report released by ORGI on Thursday. The report resulted from a mandate under the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1969 which requires medical practitioners to issue a Medical Certificate of Cause of Death (MCCD) if they are attended by a death.
The MCCD report also shows that 38.8% of medically documented deaths in 2024 were due to circulatory diseases, which include diseases related to the heart and blood vessels, high blood pressure, and others. The share of circulatory diseases in deaths in 2024 was 2.4 percentage points higher than in 2023 and the second highest after 2021, when these diseases accounted for 40.8% of MCCD deaths.
The report also shows that deaths directly related to or caused by COVID-19 fell to just 497 in 2024, less than 0.02% of the 2 million COVID-19 deaths. The number of Covid-19 related deaths recorded in the MCCD was 2,040 in 2023, 25,393 in 2022, 4,13,580 in 2021, and 160,618 in 2020.
The distribution of deaths by cause recorded in the MCCD must certainly be read on the basis that it covers less than 25% of the deaths recorded in the CRS which itself does not cover all deaths in India. For example, the CRS was estimated to capture 99% of all deaths only in 2021 and 2024, although the proportion was higher than 95% every year starting in 2019. The proportion was less than 90% before 2019.
Despite the low level of medical certification, the overall outcome of the MCCD report is in line with survey-based estimates from ORGI’s Sample Registration System (SRS) reports. As HT reported on May 22, the SRS reports also show that the proportion of deaths from cardiovascular disease is increasing over time.
