Slight rise: Editorial on India’s life expectancy and the challenge of healthier living

According to the latest Global Health Estimates released by the World Health Organization, India's life expectancy at birth was 71 years in 2023. That puts India ahead of Pakistan's 68.2 years but behind Bangladesh's 72.7 years. The United States of America and Canada remain considerably ahead, at 78.5 and 81.4 years, respectively. For India, the figure is encouraging without being flattering. Life expectancy in India had fallen from 70.5 years in 2019 to 68.1 in 2021. In two years, India, the data show, has regained 2.9 years of expected lifespan. The global picture after the pandemic offers some perspective. Life expectancy worldwide recovered to 73.3 years in 2023, almost matching the 73.4 years of 2019. Yet the numbers demand a nuanced reading. India's healthy life expectancy was 60.6 years in 2023, only marginally above the 60.5 years recorded in 2019. Living longer, evidently, is not necessarily the same as living healthier in this country. Globally, too, healthy life expectancy remained 0.4 years below its pre-pandemic level. The gap suggests that recovery in survival has not been matched by an equivalent improvement in the quality of those additional years.

The comparison between India's and Bangladesh's numbers can be particularly instructive. Bangladesh's life expectancy has been higher than India's despite it being a much smaller economy. Its per capita income is only marginally higher than India's. According to the International Monetary Fund, the nominal GDP per capita of India in April 2026 was $2,813 compared with Bangladesh's $2,911. This suggests that longevity outcomes may not only be contingent upon wealth; targeted intervention is important. Bangladesh has made significant gains in reducing child and maternal mortality and improving reproductive care in the past five decades. India's lower life expectancy can also be attributed to its difficult double burden of disease. Infectious diseases — tuberculosis, lower respiratory infections, and diarrhoeal contagions — continue to claim lives even as non-communicable diseases, such as heart ailments, stroke, and diabetes, have become dominant — from about 34% in the year, 2000, NCDs now account for nearly 75% of deaths in India. India's interventions to improve life expectancy must be multipronged. It must arrest the rise in NCD mortality, keep infectious diseases under check and also invest heavily, like Bangladesh, in reducing infant and child mortality. This requires policymakers to identify the overlaps among health, disease, socio-economic indices and equality.