Published May 29, 2026 | 7:00 AM ⚊ Updated May 29, 2026 | 7:00 AM
Representational image. Credit: iStock
Synopsis: Telangana records the country’s highest share of deaths among people aged 15–59, with nearly two in five deaths occurring during working years, according to SRS 2024 data. The pattern aligns with elevated male mortality, high youth suicide shares in southern India, and rising cardiovascular deaths, revealing the hidden demographic cost within the region’s working-age population.
Nearly two in every five deaths recorded in Telangana occur among people aged between 15 and 59 — the working years. That single figure, drawn from the SRS Statistical Report 2024, places Telangana at the top of this ranking among all bigger states in the country, well above the national average.
Some 37 percent of all deaths in Telangana fall in the 15-59 age group, against a national average of 29.8 percent. Among its southern peers, Karnataka records 33.4 percent, Tamil Nadu 31.7 percent, Andhra Pradesh 31.5 percent, and Kerala just 18.6 percent.
A companion report — the SRS Causes of Death Statistics 2022-2024, published by the same office in May 2026 — identifies the causes that drive working-age deaths. The pattern splits by decade of life.
Among people aged 15 to 29, suicide ranks as the leading cause of death in the southern region at 23 percent of all deaths in that age group — the highest suicide share of any region in the country, and above the national figure of 19 percent. Road accidents account for the second largest share of deaths in this age group in the south, followed by cardiovascular disease.
The proportion of female deaths from suicide in the 15-29 age group nationally runs at 19.6 percent — marginally higher than male deaths at 18.6 percent.
In the southern region, male deaths from suicide in this age group account for 21.7 percent of all male deaths in that bracket, and female deaths account for 25.7 percent — the highest female suicide share among young adults of any region in the country.
From the 30s onward, the cause of death shifts. Cardiovascular disease moves to the front and becomes the dominant cause of working-age mortality nationally, accounting for over a third of all deaths in that decade of life.
The causes of death report does not break this down below the 30-69 bracket, so it cannot be mapped precisely to the under-60 frame this story uses. What it establishes is the direction: injuries and suicide dominate the 20s, cardiovascular disease takes over from the 30s.
The 37 percent figure describes the share of Telangana’s total deaths that fall within the working-age band. A separate but related measure — the death rate — describes how many people per 1,000 within that age group actually die each year. Both matter, and they tell different things.
Telangana’s working-age death rate stands at 3.4 per 1,000 population in the 15-59 group — tied with Karnataka and Odisha, and above the national average of 2.9. Kerala records 2.1, Andhra Pradesh 3.0, and Tamil Nadu 3.2.
The share of working-age deaths is high because Telangana also has a large working-age population — 70.5 percent of its total, second only to Delhi. The death rate confirms that the burden is not merely a function of population size: people in the 15-59 age group in Telangana die at a higher rate than the national average, and at the highest rate among southern states.
Among working-age men, Telangana records 4.6 deaths per 1,000 — the third highest among all bigger states after Chhattisgarh and Karnataka.
In rural Telangana, that figure climbs to 5.8 per 1,000 — the second highest rural working-age male death rate in the country after Chhattisgarh, and nearly one and a half times the national rural male average of 4.0.
Telangana has built exactly the population structure that demographers describe as a dividend: a large working-age base relative to dependants at either end of the age spectrum. Its TFR sits at 1.5. Its young-child population share of 6.6 percent ranks among the lowest in the country. Its under-5 mortality rate stands at 20 against a national 28, and its IMR at 17 against a national 24.
Yet 37 percent of its deaths occur within that same working-age base. The dividend and the burden occupy the same population.
Tamil Nadu records the lowest death rate among people aged 60 and above in the country at 31.4 per 1,000 — lower even than Kerala at 38.1. Its elderly survive longer than anywhere else among bigger states.
But Tamil Nadu also records 31.7 percent of its deaths in the 15-59 age group — above the national average — and a working-age male death rate of 4.2 per 1,000, with rural working-age men recording 5.2 per 1,000. The causes of death data places the southern region at the highest suicide share among deaths in the 15-29 group of any zone in the country.
Tamil Nadu carries excess mortality in the working years that gives way to strong survival once that threshold passes — a pattern the numbers record without yet explaining.
