Counting Rabies Deaths: Surveillance, Death Registration and ICMR Model Diverge Widely as India Targets Elimination by 2030

On 5 October 2026, The Hindu reported that India still has no single comparable national count of human rabies deaths: the Health Ministry's IDSP-IHIP surveillance logged 54 deaths in 2024, the Registrar General of India's Medical Certification of Cause of Death (MCCD) system recorded 271 in 2023, while an ICMR-National Institute of Epidemiology (ICMR-NIE) model published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases estimates 5,726 deaths a year — even as India aims to eliminate dog-mediated human rabies by 2030.