India, Sept. 14 -- A paper published in The Lancet last week said that death rates from chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke increased in India in the decade leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic - even as they fell in four out of five countries covered by the study.

The paper --- Benchmarking progress in non-communicable diseases: a global analysis of cause-specific mortality from 2001 to 2019 --- said that the increase was larger for Indian females than for Indian males, for whom the probability of dying from a non-communicable disease (NCD) between birth and age 80 increased by only 0.1 percentage points. The increase in the probability of dying from an NCD between birth and age 80 was driven by a rise in mortality...