Measurement of malaria mortality is a public health challenge that has been met with various solutions. Outside Africa, these estimates usually rely on governmental recorded deaths, which have been adjusted in various ways to account for incomplete reporting.1 In The Lancet today, Neeraj Dhingra and colleagues2 use the results of verbal autopsies to provide estimates for malaria mortality in India; non-medical field workers did verbal autopsies for 122 291 community deaths across 6671 sites in India between 2001 and 2003.