English  Français

Completeness of death registration in India: An empirical approach

Krishna Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Nandita Saikia, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

Lack of accurate data on mortality rates and cause of death could lead demographers to make inaccurate estimations of trends and lead to an inadequate healthcare intervention by the public health decision makers. The existing methods of estimation of completeness of death registration use indirect techniques, based on many assumptions. Indirect techniques for mortality estimation are unsatisfactory among demographers and its wider application are limited to sub-national population. We aim to estimate the completeness of death registration at the India’s state level. We used annual report of Civil Registration System (CRS), 2016 for obtaining information on registered deaths by India’s states. We estimated the completeness of all age death registration using the empirical method. The empirical method uses logit regression model. We found that completeness of death registration at the national level was 70 percent, ranging from 16.8 percent in Bihar to 99 percent in Kerala. CRS provided estimates of completeness of death registration for 2016 at the national level was over-reported by 8 percent. The empirical method fit better in estimation of registered death completeness at the national and sub-national level and could be useful in comparison of death registration level with other administrative regions or countries.

Keywords: Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS), Mortality, Methodology, Population geography

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session 183. Measurement of Mortality and Causes of Death