But he said the lack of data elsewhere makes it difficult to replicate the results in Ahmedabad on a national level.”Not reporting these deaths, sharing data, is like the Indian Meteorological Department not sharing weather data,” he said. “We can easily do this across the country but we’ve not decided that we should do it.”Improving government dataThe Indian government collects data on heat-related deaths through the health ministry’s National Centre for Disease Control which is then shared with the National Disaster Management Agency. The agency then shares the data as a total nationwide figure for the year, but a state by state breakdown is not publicly available.The National Crime Records Bureau also collects heat-related death data as part of their accounting of deaths due to “forces of nature” and publishes those figures.But there are huge discrepancies. In 2020, the last year with publicly available data on heat deaths from both official sources, the crime records bureau recorded 530 deaths from heatstroke, but the disaster agency reported just four heat-related deaths.The Associated Press contacted India’s health ministry spokesperson, the NCDC and the NDMA to comment on the discrepancy but did not receive a response.Getting better data can answer a whole host of questions about who is most vulnerable and how best to help them, said Bharghav Krishna, a public health expert and a fellow at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative thinktank, “especially with respect to identifying who is dying, where they’re dying, what are they doing when they’re dying.”Krishna thinks that the data currently collected, while inadequate, can at least provide some insight for policymakers and researchers and force at least some action if its shared with the right people.But Malavankar said the issues of data collection are more systemic, and that needs to be urgently addressed.”We have not done a national census since 2011, not having numbers is our national weakness,” he said.
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