In 2025, India recorded 55 deaths by malaria, 131 deaths by dengue, and 27 deaths by kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis or black fever), according to Union Health Ministry data, whereas there is no single comparable and comprehensive national measure of its annual human rabies mortality, even as the country looks to eliminate dog-mediated human rabies by the year 2030.
These figures are not directly comparable — the IDSP-IHIP is a disease surveillance system, while the MCCD captures medically certified causes through civil registration. The government’s published table, labelled ‘Human Rabies cases (Death)’, gives the source as IDSP-IHIP. The researchers used the community survey, laboratory data, and a probability decision-tree model to estimate the number of people who progress from an animal bite to rabies and die. “Lack of consolidated data is a challenge in rabies eradication. Very often cases and deaths occur in areas of the country where they are not measurable. Meanwhile, the Lancet study found important gaps even after animal bites. Among those who received only one dose, nearly half did not complete the vaccination course. Rabies is a vaccine-preventable viral disease that attacks the central nervous system and is almost invariably fatal once symptoms appear, with infected dog bites causing most human transmission.
Neither system, therefore, provides a complete national count — underscoring the gaps in India’s rabies mortality surveillance. The 5,726 figure is therefore a modelled estimate of annual deaths, and not a count of deaths recorded in hospitals or by government surveillance. While a community-based study led by researchers from the Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Epidemiology (ICMR-NIE) and published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases recently estimated that 5,726 people die of rabies in India every year, the Health Ministry’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme-Integrated Health Information Platform (IDSP-IHIP) system reported 21 deaths by rabies in 2022, 50 in 2023, and 54 in 2024. At the national level, the MCCD covered 22.3% of registered deaths in 2022, and 22.0% in 2023. The government table, sourced to IDSP-IHIP, had recorded one death in January 2025 but did not provide a figure for all of 2025. ICMR for its study surveyed 3,37,808 people in 78,807 households across 60 districts in 15 States and estimated that India sees about 9.1 million animal bites every year, including about 5.6 million dog bites. About one in five dog-bite victims had not received the anti-rabies vaccine, while only 66.2% had received at least three doses. Only about one in 10 eligible victims received passive immunisation.
Vaccination of stray dogs, stringent post-exposure vaccination for humans, and disruption of the rabies chain is essential to curb the problem,” Nirmal Kumar Ganguly, medical scientist, public health expert, and former ICMR chief, speaking exclusively to The Hindu , said.
