In 2013 the Indian government’s official records put malaria deaths in the country at 440. The government’s own medical certification of cause of death report put them at 5,428. A committee of the Indian Council of Medical Research put them at 40,297. The Lancet put them at 205,000.

I came across those four numbers sitting next to each other while running a stakeholder audit for Malaria No More in India, and the finding that mattered was not a health finding. State funding was allocated against reported incidence. The count was wrong by somewhere between ten and a hundred times, so the funding was wrong, so the delivery was wrong. Nobody in that chain was lying. Each of them was reporting the number their instrument produced.