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A new international study published in Science Advances this month – co-authored by Nuffield Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow Aashish Gupta with Professorial Fellow Ridhi Kashyap and others – finds that life expectancy in India was 2.6 years lower in 2020 than 2019, and that women and marginalised social group suffered the biggest declines.

The research finds that overall mortality across India was 17% higher in 2020 compared to 2019, implying 1.19 million excess deaths in India. This extrapolated estimate is about eight times higher than the official number of COVID-19 deaths in India, and 1.5 times higher than the World Health Organization’s estimates of excess mortality.

On the research findings, Ridhi, who is a member of the Department of Sociology and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, told the University of Oxford,

‘Our findings challenge the view that 2020 was not significant in terms of the mortality impacts and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. While a mortality surge caused by the Delta variant in 2021 received more attention, our study reveals significant and unequal mortality increases even earlier on in the pandemic.'

Using high-quality survey data from 765,180 individuals, the study estimated changes in life expectancy at birth, by sex and social group between 2019 and 2020 in India. It found large mortality impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 on younger age groups, women, and marginalised social groups. The patterns of larger mortality increases among women in India contrasts with the pattern in high-income countries, where men generally experienced larger increases in excess mortality. Marginalised social groups within India experienced greater life expectancy declines than the most privileged social groups.

Lead author on the study Aashish Gupta – also a member of the Department of Sociology and the Leverhulme Centre – said:

‘Marginalised groups already had lower life expectancy, and the pandemic further increased the gap between the most privileged Indian social groups, and the most marginalised social groups in India.’

The results of this study have been picked up across national Indian and international news organisations, including the BBC, Al Jazeera, New Scientist and Telegraph India, among others.

A full overview of the study can be found in the University of Oxford’s news story from 20 July 2024.

The original paper can be found at Gupta, A. et al. (2024) ‘Large and unequal life expectancy declines during the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2020’, Science Advances, 10:29, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk2070.