India’s COVID-19 death toll crossed the 2.5 lakh mark on Wedneday, but experts say the official death count is hugely underreported. Comparisons of official data with those from people on the frontlines suggest the true number is several times higher.

Across the country, the devastating COVID-19 wave has overwhelmed the healthcare system with shortages of oxygen, hospital bed and key supplies being reported from across the country. Crematoriums and burial grounds are running out of space with state government’s making temporary arrangements for the last rites of COVID victims. Corpses of suspected COVID-19 victims have also been seen floating down the holy Ganges river in Uttar Pradesh.

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Officially, India has recorded 2.33 crore COVID cases and 2.5 lakh deaths since January 2020, when the first case was reported in the country.

But, experts say the official quarter-million death count is hugely underreported.  “Even three to four times would be an underestimate,” Anant Bhan, an independent health policy and bioethics researcher, told AFP.

The discrepancies appear particularly stark in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat.

In Rajkot in the west of the state, the official death toll between April 1-23 was 154, yet the city’s own health officials put it at 723. And in Bharuch, the official count for the same period was just 23 but there were 600 funerals, the agency reports.

Gujarat‘s chief minister Vijay Rupani insisted that the state was following guidelines from the Indian Council of Medical Research.

The guidelines say that only deaths directly caused by COVID-19 can be recorded as such, but not fatalities triggered by co-morbidities — when a COVID patient had heart problems and dies of cardiac arrest, for instance.

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Even before the pandemic, just 22 % of the nearly 10 million annual deaths in India were medically certified, and experts say the spike in funerals points to the same happening with COVID-19 fatalities.

The surge has pushed the Aishbagh Burial Ground in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh state, to the brink.

Hafiz Abdul Mateen from the graveyard told AFP it handled four to five burials a day before the pandemic. “Today, 45 bodies of Covid victims have been buried here,” he said.

“We’ve increased the number of gravediggers but that’s also not enough as these men are getting tired and falling sick.”

The official figures for deaths in some other states, including Uttar Pradesh and Haryana also do not align with the number of funerals.

Media reports have also suggested that the official numbers for the national capital also fall well short of the ground reality.

“Our estimate is 50 % of COVID-19 deaths are not registered by the government,” Jitender Singh Shanty, in charge of one of Delhi’s 26 crematoriums, told AFP.

Health economist and research Rijo M. John described the situation as a “battle for data, data sharing and transparency”.

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But a spokesperson for ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) denied allegations of undercounting or political motivations behind the mismatch in fatality numbers.

“It is not possible for anyone to hide the numbers in this age and time,” R.P. Singh told AFP.

Despite the assurances, some are not convinced.

“The government is saying the positivity rate is coming down and the situation is improving. How can it be possible when corpses are being dumped in rivers in dozens?” said college student Sonalika Sahay, 22.