More people die of diabetes, suicides in India than terrorism: Report

“One has to be alive to be a patriot,” former Indian health secretary K Sujatha Rao wrote on Twitter on May 13, 2019, referring to election debates that focussed on issues of “nationalism and terror and not health”.

The data back Rao’s assertion of misplaced priorities.

In 2017, terrorism claimed the lives of 766 Indians, or 0.007% of all deaths, while health reasons claimed 6.6 million Indians, or 90% of all deaths.

In 2017, the last year for which comparable data are available, India’s spending on defence