Fewer births, more deaths in Delhi during pandemic: Data

Delhi recorded 10.5% more births and 25.3% fewer deaths last year compared to 2021, according to data from the Union territory's Civil Registration System (CRS) released on Thursday, which showed one of the biggest year-on-year changes in both statistics in 2022.

- Abhishek Jha and Alok KN Mishra

Even in terms of birth and death rates — number of births/deaths per thousand population — the 2022 numbers showed a significant departure from pre-pandemic trends.

The data showed that while Delhi’s birth rate has been gradually declining for a long time, the rate of this decline increased significantly during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. Inversely, death registrations saw a significant spike during the pandemic years before settling down again in 2022.

The birth rate in 2019, which was 18.4 children born per thousand population, fell to 14.9 in 2020 and then touched 13.1 in 2021. While this number recovered slightly to touch 14.2 in 2022, it still remains significantly lower than what it was before the pandemic.

As far as the death rate is concerned, data shows that mortality reduced significantly between 2021 and 2022 — which is understandable given the severity of the second wave of the pandemic in 2021 — and was also the lowest in nearly a decade (since 2013). In 2022, there were 6.07 deaths for every thousand residents, compared to 8.28 in 2021 and 7.03 in 2020.

The 2022-23 Economic Survey of the Delhi government had also published CRS based birth and death rates for 2021.

In absolute numbers, the number of births in Delhi jumped from 271,786 in 2021 to 300,350 in 2022. The number of births, meanwhile, fell from 171,476 in 2021, to 128,106 in 2022, the data showed. Infant mortality rate increased to 23.82 per 1,000 live births in 2022, from 23.6 in 2021, while maternal mortality rate also increased from 0.44 per thousand births in 2021, to 0.49 during 2022.

What do these numbers mean as far as a larger trend in Delhi’s population? The CRS data has limited utility because it only takes into account recorded births and deaths and does not exclude births or deaths on account of non-domicile population in the city-state.