In the absence of a reliable Civil Registration System in India, the sample registration system, beginning in 1970, has been the only source of information that allows us to track the Sustainable Development Goals, calculate the human development index, and measure sex ratios. Since 2001, however, there has been no attempt to examine the quality of the sample registration system. In this context, the present article carries out such an exercise and finds that there was an undercounting of deaths in India by around 4.3% for males and 11.3% for females during 2001 – 10.
