Life expectancy in Maha went down 2.36 years during Covid-19
MUMBAI: With two million excess deaths during the Covid-19 years, the average life span in India took a hit, reversing the gradual upwards trend for the first time in five decades.
In Maharashtra, life expectancy went down by 2.36 years, with men bearing over six times the burden than women, an analysis of 2021 mortality data released by the government on May 7 by research scholars and a professor at the Indian Institute of Population Studies (IIPS) has revealed.
The analysis was conducted by PhD research scholars Chandan Kumar, Pravat Bhandari and Himanshu Jaiswal under the supervision of Suryakant Yadav, an assistant professor at IIPS.
'Men are more vulnerable to death from external factors,' said one of the people behind the analysis, which they plan to submit to journals. 'Men tend to work outside the home, and this increased their proximity with high-risk zones during the Covid years. They tended to go out to earn and get supplies more, increasing their risk of contracting Covid.'
Overall, the country saw a 1.6-year decline in life expectancy, falling from 70.4 years in 2019 to 68.8 years in 2021. Only three states, Rajasthan, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh, escaped this with modest gains in life expectancy by 2021.
In this statistic too, men took the larger share—2.7 times that of women—of the dip. Their life span dropped 2.2 years, from 68.9 years to 66.7 years. Women, on the other hand, lived five months less on an average, from 72.1 years in 2019 to 71.5 years in 2021.
Other states too saw this trend. 'This pattern of greater life expectancy loss among males compared to females was evident across all the 22 states analysed, though its magnitude varied significantly across states,' says the report. 'In Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand, the decline in life expectancy in males was greater than five times that of females. Conversely, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh exhibited the smallest gender differences, with losses in male life expectancy being less than 1.5 times than that of females.'
The report says that the decline in male life expectancy further widened India's gender gap in life expectancy in 2021—it increased by 3.2 years in 2021 from 2.8 years in the pre-pandemic period. This effectively erased the slow progress India had been making in life expectancy over the years, taking it back by eight years to the 2013 level when average life expectancy was 68.8 years.
'India took an average of five years to add a one-year increase in life expectancy,' says the analysis. 'Hence, a loss of 1.6 years in life expectancy at birth reveals that the gains made over the past decade during normal or pre-pandemic years were effectively erased during the Covid pandemic. In other words, the Covid pandemic has rolled India's progress in life expectancy back to that of almost a decade earlier.'
With the absence of death data of the years after 2021, it is yet to be seen at what pace life expectancy recovers. 'Several high-income countries have seen a quick rebound in the losses in life expectancy, successfully reversing the losses in the post-pandemic years,' said one of the study participants. 'They are advantaged, with better infrastructure and better regulation, and with work-from-home decreasing risk. But we too should be optimistic about the rate India will bounce back from the setback caused by Covid.'
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