New data has shed light on just how unequal the effects of the Covid pandemic have been on different communities in India. Where average life expectancy at birth is thought to have dropped by 2.6 years between 2019 and 2020, this is estimated to have been even more extreme among marginalised social groups, further exacerbating pre-existing inequalities. This is according to a study of 7,65,180 people, representative of one quarter of India’s population, published in Science Advances.
As the following chart shows, Muslim Indians are estimated to have seen their life expectancy at birth drop by 5.4 years between 2019 and 2020, by far the greatest amount of the studied groups. Where the average life expectancy was 68.8 in 2019, it fell to 63.4 in 2020. By contrast, high-caste Hindu Indians saw the smallest decline at -1.3 years, changing from 71 years of life expectancy to 69.7 years.
For those identifying in the Scheduled Tribes group and Scheduled Castes group, declines in life expectancy were also greater than for more privileged social groups, at a loss of 4.1 years and 2.7 years, respectively. According to the report: “These declines among marginalised groups are similar or greater in absolute magnitude than declines experienced by Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans in the United States during the pandemic.”
Gender too had an impact. Unlike wider global trends, women in India experienced greater declines in life expectancy than men, with a drop one year greater compared to their male counterparts. According to the report, this may reflect gender inequality in India, with reference to how Indian households spend less on health care for females relative to males, adding that this is “a pattern which likely worsened during the pandemic”.
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